Friday 14th Dutch user Group SDN had a full day meeting. The SDN has a very long history, it started in the DOS days as a Clipper Developer group. Over the years a couple of refactorings and renames later it's now mainly a .NET user group with a big Delphi stream and a smaal Visual Objects (the product Clipper evolved into) pool.
A keynote was given by (Microsofts' !) Steve Martin. In a short amount of time he had the audience flabbergasted with a smooth and fast talk on SOA which started from a business perspective ; not the best way to grab the attention of developpers. But in the end of the talk he focused on modeling and gave a brief outline on what to expect from MS in the coming months.
Steve promised a full featured modeling language. Greg's observations immediately crossed my mind.
The "normal" presentations were with their feet on the ground focusing on what is available today to build your everyday applications. Notable was the enormous interest in Enterprise Library, with many people using the stuff. What pleased me most was the great focus on testing. I followed several sessions on web development, either using Script#, Silverlight or Volta. A major concern for both speakers and participators was the testability of the code. They really focused on that. Great !
Another good sign is .NET magazine, which is fully Microsoft sponsored, in Dutch and completely focuses on developers. It has the expectable stories like "what's new in VS 2008"; but in the form of a good survey. It doesn't stick to MS only. In the latest editions there are articles like "Getting started with nHibernate", "IronPython, programming with pleasure", "Domain Driven Software Factory", "Castle Monorail in a real life app", "Testing keeps us sharp". And in many of the other articles tools sometimes labeled as alt.net are mentioned.
Seeing all of this has me convinced there is (over here) no such thing as a status quo between doing things the "MS" way and doing things the "right" way. The way we develop software is not being battled over but constantly co-evolving. With all participants, tool manufacturers (like MS) and tool users, looking for shared ground. To be found where an user group meets.