I was part of alt.net years ago, and it died for a variety of reasons but one of the primary ones was that many influential members of it were taken in by the lure of the Microsoft MVP program and the consulting prestige that it offered. This slowly lead to the underlying message of ALT.NET becoming undermined and co-opted it until it was just another part of the MS/.NET marketing machine and many of us simply lost interest.
One of ALT.NET's flagship events was the yearly unconference that was held, ironically, at Microsoft's main campus in Redmond. For the most part it was a truly inspiring event and inspired me and few others in Vancouver to try to do something similar locally. However, we decided that making an event and organization like this language, framework, or ecosystem specific was unnecessarily limiting, so we decided to call it the [Polyglot UnConference](http://www.polyglotconf.com/)
We've been running this quietly for a number of years now. Many of the original ALT.NET people from the Seattle area regularly attend and we are always at capacity. We also use the organization we created to help organize and sponsor other events as well like CascadiaJS, Erlang Factory Lite and Devops Days.
On that note, we would be love to help other groups and localities copy this model and to help grow it.
Bringing ALT.NET back would be a mistake precisely because by definition of being .NET oriented it limits the kind of thinking, discussions and people who can or want to be involved. ALT.NET inspired a lot of new thinking in the .NET community but ironically it also inspired many of them (myself included) to walk away from .NET and explore more open ecosystems. If anyone really wants to rekindle what ALT.NET inspired then I highly suggest they endeavour to carry the movement forward by taking new steps. Don't retrace the old steps of ALT.NET for nostalgia's sake.
I'd love to see some of the ALT.NET passion come back around the .Net core space... but it feels like you can't attend a meeting/presentation that isn't also tethered to Azure demos. I mean, I actually like/appreciate what Azure offers, but it was the feeling that every MS presentation was a sales demo for Azure that drove me away from attending the local presentations several years ago.
ScottGu presents in the Phoenix area with a few others once a year, and I always really enjoyed it. I don't recall what year it was (2012 I think) that pretty much every demo was an Azure demo, that I just stopped going to them, and the local user groups as well.
I'm genuinely interested in .Net core... I love VS Code... but I'm not interested in an Azure sales demo.
One of ALT.NET's flagship events was the yearly unconference that was held, ironically, at Microsoft's main campus in Redmond. For the most part it was a truly inspiring event and inspired me and few others in Vancouver to try to do something similar locally. However, we decided that making an event and organization like this language, framework, or ecosystem specific was unnecessarily limiting, so we decided to call it the [Polyglot UnConference](http://www.polyglotconf.com/)
We've been running this quietly for a number of years now. Many of the original ALT.NET people from the Seattle area regularly attend and we are always at capacity. We also use the organization we created to help organize and sponsor other events as well like CascadiaJS, Erlang Factory Lite and Devops Days.
On that note, we would be love to help other groups and localities copy this model and to help grow it.
Bringing ALT.NET back would be a mistake precisely because by definition of being .NET oriented it limits the kind of thinking, discussions and people who can or want to be involved. ALT.NET inspired a lot of new thinking in the .NET community but ironically it also inspired many of them (myself included) to walk away from .NET and explore more open ecosystems. If anyone really wants to rekindle what ALT.NET inspired then I highly suggest they endeavour to carry the movement forward by taking new steps. Don't retrace the old steps of ALT.NET for nostalgia's sake.