The Idea of .NET Fringe…

I’ve been meaning to sit down and write up some thoughts on the coming .NET Fringe Conference here in Portland. Being held at the Bossanova Ballroom it’s not your normal tech conference – being that Troy Howard, Glenn Block, the team, and I wouldn’t be putting on a corporate style conference – we’re community grassroots hard core. There’s going to be some hard core tech conversations about the direction of .NET, and hard core conversations about so many of the open source aspects of that tech stack.

With topics ranging widely, one of the topics that really has interested me is the Akka .NET framework for a multitude of reasons. Partly because I’ve already played around with the original Akka Framework and have worked with Erlang. For more on their connectedness, check out actors for Akka and Erlang and dive actor model, passing and into the respective concurrency searches.

But as I started to write up thoughts about what I hoped to learn, experience, and who I wanted to meet and discuss these things with at .NET Fringe …  a host of blog entries appeared over the last few weeks mirroring many of my thoughts.

Christos Matskas @christosmatskas

Guess Who’s Attending & Speaking at .NET Fringe?

Last night, I spent over 3 hours on Skype with Glenn, who took time off his busy schedule to help me arrange tickets, accommodation, visas etc and stayed on until he was certain I was all sorted for my trip. He deserves more than a big thank you and I will make sure I convey my gratitude when I shake his hand in person!

As I’m writing this, I can barely contain my enthusiasm counting the hours to my first trip to the US and my first conference outside Europe.

Glenn Block @gblock

.NET Fringe – Defining the Future

There’s too many examples to name all but I’ll list a few recent projects that illustrate this : jQuery, NuGet, Github,JSON.NET, Automapper, Xamarin, NancyFX, and .NET vNext. This is just a sampling that does not do justice as there are many many other examples.

This change is important. This is just the beginning, but it’s a great beginning. A group of us think this is so important, that we’re putting together an event focused on this topic, .NET Fringe.

We’re bringing together members of the .NET OSS community that have been working to define the future. They are going to share their works, share their learnings, and share their passion. And it’s happening in Portland, a place rich in OSS culture.

Itamar Syn-Hershko @synhershko

.NET Fringe Let’s Build a Stronger Community Around OSS & .NET

For many years now the .NET framework and its ecosystem are viewed as a Microsoft thing, where its a product by a company and you either opt to use it (on Windows servers only) or not. Unlike other ecosystems, the community seemed to have no control over the direction the technology takes; the community has to align with Microsoft’s view which, as you’d expect, isn’t always what the users wanted.

While it was true for many years and some of it still is, things are changing. Many Microsoft projects are now open-source, on github, and accepting Pull Requests. A lot of development is now happening in the open, in that context the weeklyASP.NET Community Standup deserves a mention.

Microsoft is changing, for real. It is my belief that we, as a community, need to step up and strike while the iron is hot to shape the future of the .NET ecosystem.

Iris Classon @IrisClasson

Welcome to .NET Fringe in Portland Oregon

Instead of a quote, I’ll just let Iris’ do the talking…   😉

Shawn Wildermuth @shawnwildermuth

.NET Fringe is Coming!

As many of you know, I’m not in the country at the moment but if I were, I’d be going to.NET Fringe in Portland, Oregon on April 12-14th. This new conference is all about open source in the .NET space and I and really excited that a conference is focused on it.

I have a couple of small, older .NET open source libraries, but my real facination has been with where the overall community is going. Both Microsoft and the community at large are all going open source and it’s great news for us all I think.