I attended my first user group meeting tonight.  It was the Minneapolis ALT.NET User Group.  It was a good experience. I went in not expecting much as it was the inaugural group meeting in the Twin Cities.   I was accompanied by my fellow geek, Jason.  The ALT.NET group is something I’ve recently started following after a few posts that I ran across in my searches for professional development and to find different and potentially better ways of doing things.

Since finding the group, reading some blogs, and listening to the podcasts, I’ve become more of an advocate of finding the right tools and methods to gain efficiency and provide appropriate methods to provide appropriate client solutions.  I like and respect the passion in the community, hope it continues on, and hope that I can appropriately contribute my successes and stories back.

At my current job we are currently “rewriting” our main application, converting it from a VFP windows fat client to a .NET web based solution.  We decided to go with NHibernate vs other ORM’s or self-baked DAL’s.  Since we are starting from scratch (at least from a system/application perspective), I am very interested in promoting some of the ideas from the ALT.NET community.  Having been with the company for only a year and seeing some of the struggles with the current implementation,  I feel that in our particular problem domain I think DDD is something that would be extremely benificial.  The same goes for Continuous Integration, and unit tests…. (any unit tests). I’d even prefer a new method of source control.  That leads me to one of my motivations for the ALT.NET community…how do you sell some of this new stuff to your development manager and your company president?  Obviously I can initiate discussions and float my ideas, but how do I grab traction and have a concrete example of how this is better than it is today? What are other success stories out there?

I’m open for comments and I hope to pick some brains about some of this.