St. Louis ALT.NET Meetup

The ALT.NET community is a loosely coupled, highly cohesive group of like-minded individuals who believe that the best developers do not align themselves with platforms and languages, but with principles and ideas. In 2007, David Laribee created the term "ALT.NET" to explain this "alternative" view of the Microsoft development universe--a view that challenged the "Microsoft-only" approach to software development. He distilled his thoughts into four key developer characteristics which form the basis of the ALT.NET philosophy: 1. You're the type of developer who uses what works while keeping an eye out for a better way. 2. You reach outside the mainstream to adopt the best of any community: Open Source, Agile, Java, Ruby, etc. 3. You're not content with the status quo. Things can always be better expressed, more elegant and simple, more mutable, higher quality, etc. 4. You know tools are great, but they only take you so far. It's the principles and knowledge that really matter. The best tools are those that embed the knowledge and encourage the principles (e.g. Resharper.) The St. Louis ALT.NET meetup group is a place where .NET developers can learn, share, and critique approaches to software development on the .NET stack. We cater to the highest common denominator, not the lowest, and want to help all St. Louis .NET developers achieve a superior level of software craftsmanship.

Events coming up

We don't have any upcoming events for this user group. Do you know this group? If so, why not submit a future event? We also support iCal, EventBrite and Meetup feeds.

Past events

  • LIGHTNING TALKS: Tools of the Trade

    Thu, 25 Oct 2012, 00:00 - 03:00 in St Louis, United States

    Are there little tools that you use alongside VS during .NET development? Tools that you can't live without? Tools that other developers probably don't know about, or at least don't know how to use well? Are you a NINJA with one of these tools? Then come and give a 5-10min lightning talk and show us all how awesome you really are! (To volunteer for a lightning talk leave a comment with your name and the tool you are going to demo.

  • Intro to NoSQL and RavenDB

    Thu, 27 Sep 2012, 00:00 - 03:00 in St Louis, United States

    Joe Couch will take us on a tour of the .NET NoSQL data store, RavenDB.

  • ASP.NET MVC4

    25-26 Jul 2012 in St Louis, United States

    Nick Brabon will be talking about the new features in ASP.NET MVC4.

  • You've got Aspects in my Objects - two great tastes that taste great together

    23-24 May 2012 in St Louis, United States

    Steve Bohlen will be visiting our group this month, talking to us about Aspect Oriented Programming.It probably comes as no surprise to anyone with any real-world software development experience that Object-Oriented inheritance modeling can’t cleanly solve every class of problem we face as software engineers.  AOP (Aspect-Oriented Programming)

  • ASP.NET MVC 4 in Action with Jeffrey Palermo

    1-2 May 2012 in St Louis, United States

    NOTE: This meetup is on Tuesday, May 1 instead of Wednesday, April 25.NOTE: I am now taking pre-orders for Jefferey's book.  Please let me know if you want a copy. *6PM - 7PM BYOB/snacks and social time *7PM - 9PM Presentation(s)

  • OOP Principles with Ken Sipe

    28-29 Mar 2012 in St Louis, United States

    *6PM - 7PM BYOB/snacks and social time *7PM - 9PM Presentation(s)For decades object-oriented programming has been sold (perhaps over sold) as the logical programming paradigm which provides “the way" to software reuse and reductions in the cost of software maintenance as if it comes for free with the simple selection of the an OO language.

  • Powerful Pattern Matching in F# / UX Techniques

    Thu, 23 Feb 2012, 00:00 - 02:00 in St Louis, United States

    *6PM - 7PM BYOB/snacks and social time *7PM - 9PM PresentationsPowerful Pattern Matching in F#F# opens a whole new world to .NET developers: the functional world. Pattern matching is one of the killer features of functional languages, and F# takes pattern matching to a whole new level. This talk will introduce the phenomenal cosmic power of custom patterns in F#. See this cool language in action and learn a new way to think about some common programming problems.

  • How Ruby is Making Me a Stronger C# Developer and a Better Man (Darren Cauthon)

    Thu, 26 Jan 2012, 00:00 - 02:00 in St Louis, United States

    Darren Cauthon (@darrencauthon) will be joining us in January to talk about his experiences with Ruby and C#. Darren is a Kansas City native and is very active in the .NET community there. --- "There's a lot of talk of how great and superior Ruby is to, well... everything. But is it true? Should everyone switch to Ruby? Or is Ruby just for hipster programmers? I started to take a deeper look at Ruby last year, and found a lot to like.

  • Holiday Hackfest

    Sat, 31 Dec 2011, 00:00 - 02:00 in St Louis, United States

    There will be no presentation for the December meetup--instead, bring your laptops and hacking skills for an evening of jolly coding! If you want help with a project, or are just interested in exploring a technology further, bring your code and questions and collaborate with other group members. There will also be coding challenge competitions and prizes, as well as our normal swag raffle! If you're not too burnt out on holiday snacks, feel free to bring some to share with the group.

  • Introduction to CoffeeScript and Hubot

    Thu, 1 Dec 2011, 00:00 - 02:00 in St Louis, United States

    Nicholas Cloud will be giving an introductory talk on CoffeeScript, a terse language that compiles down to JavaScript.Mark Borcherding will be talking about Hubot, a script bot based on Github's "Campfire" bot, which uses CoffeeScript for world domination.

  • Using rake to make your builds majestic

    2-3 Nov 2011 in St Louis, United States

    PLEASE NOTE: Presentations will still be from 7PM - 9PM.  If you are interested in coming early to socialize/hack, and want to bring beer/soda/snacks, you can arrive anytime after 6PM.Rake is a software task management tool, written in ruby for managing ruby projects.  By leveraging gems like albacore, rake can be used to automate tasks such as builds, configuration, assembly versioning, database deployments, unit testing, etc. for .NET projects as well.

  • Annual social event

    28-29 Sep 2011 in St Louis, United States

    STL ALT.NET started off the right way: a bunch of smart people talking tech and drinking beer on a sunny Wednesday in September. That was one year ago. Our group has grown significantly since then. This month we will forego our normal format for something a little more laid back, and give members a chance to get to know each other better, share experiences and opinions, and of course, drink more beer.

  • Open source .NET micro web frameworks

    Thu, 28 Apr 2011, 00:00 - 02:00 in Saint Louis, United States

    Micro web frameworks are very thin, very lean libraries for serving web pages that do away with high ceremony configuration and mountains of code in favor of simple templates and dynamic view models.  The Sinatra micro web framework has become very popular in the Ruby community, and it has inspired open source developers in the .NET ecosystem to follow suit.  We will be talking about two of these frameworks, Jessica and Nancy.

  • Threading in C#

    Thu, 24 Mar 2011, 00:00 - 02:00 in Saint Louis, United States

    Threading is one of those "black arts" that the really advanced Ninjas know how to do.  I've done a bit of it in the past, but I want to learn more.  Libraries like the TPL for LINQ are very useful, but are not a true substitute for threading. *Threading basics *Writing thread-safe code *Sharing state between threads *Synchronizing threads *The thread pool *Delegates and threads *Other parallel approaches (e.g., the TPL)

  • Using Git... and other marvels

    Thu, 24 Feb 2011, 01:00 - 03:00 in Saint Louis, United States

    Mark Borcherding will be demonstrating the wonders of the distributed version control system Git, and showing you why it puts your source control to shame!Additional topic(s) may also be covered--watch this meetup page for updates!

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