Nov 11 2008
Enterprise .NET Development with Opensource .NET tools: SPA2009
I just got the e-mail that my proposal for a session on Enterprise .NET Development with Opensource .NET tools was accepted for the Software practice advancement 2009 conference. The conference will take place in London in April 2009.
This session will be presented as an experience report from several enteprise .NET projects I have been involved in over the course of the last two years, which all included extensive use of opensource tools. Most of the innovation today in software happens in the opensource community and it is driven by opensource tools, but the attitude of software companies in the .NET market towards opensource tools is a lot worse then in the Java world. Using opensource tools on .NET project allows us to harness the innovation years before equivalent commercial tools appear. It also causes a lot more political and personal opposition, from lawyers that are concerned about licensing to contractors who refuse to do it because “it’s not .NET”. In this session, I will present the benefits that my teams got from the Castle project stack, NServiceBus, NHibernate and the like, what problems we faced on the way, how we solved them, how to shorten the learning curve for people with a more traditional .NET background and how to convince managers and lawyers that this is not a danger for them.
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> contractors who refuse to do it because “it’s not .NET”.
is this really specific to contractors?
(sounds like a great session btw.)
I have not heard that from any permanent employees, but I heard this over and over from contractors. I guess that they wanted to keep their skillset focused on ASP.NET because they knew that they would be looking for a new contract in six months, and did not wanted to learn and explore new ideas. On the other hand, some contractors that I’ve worked with in the past are now complete converts to opensource and they have no problem finding new gigs.
bizarre. i’ve been contracting over a year now and haven’t noticed the differences you mention. it’s well known that dotnetters in general are often very hostile to OSS with FUD and myths aplenty, but this seems to vary more with the culture of the team and the lack of imagination (or otherwise) of the individual developer, rather than the specifics of the employment arrangements.
It does seem bizarre. As a contractor I’m always grateful to have a project to work on where I’m *forced* to learn something knew since it improves the appeal of my CV and widens my skill set.
I can’t see why the code licence would make any difference to that. In fact, I’d probably rather work with OSS stuff because a) if it doesn’t work in my scenario I can change it and b) I get to learn from the code and improve my own coding as a result.
Finally, working on an OSS project is a great way to advertise your services, which is surely something that a contract has to care about.
> they wanted to keep their skillset focused on ASP.NET because they knew that they
> would be looking for a new contract in six months, and did not wanted to learn and
> explore new ideas.
the fact that i’m back on the job market every 1 to 12 months means i keep my skills sharp and work hard to differentiate myself from the drones. expertise with NHibernate, Castle, Rhino etc is part of my USP.