The year was 2000. Java was not catching on in the Southeast corner of Virginia (aka Hampton Roads). On the planet “Washington DC” that I came from, Java was competing neck and neck with the Microsoft COM languages, but Microsoft still ruled supreme in Hampton Roads (as evidenced by the tech recruiters salivating over MCSD credentials and the experience to back them up). Dispite my latent Java evangelical tendencies, I started working in a Microsoft shop doing web development; deep down inside, however, I thought Java would have been a more powerful approach. I kept expecting the Java frenzy to migrate to Southeastern Virginia but the projects never materialized.
Then along came .Net.
Some called it MS Java (but that name had already been used with J++), but on closer inspection it was actually an improvement on Java and -- this was the clincher -- Microsoft had a powerful tool for wielding .Net in Visual Studio .Net. VS.Net is much more than a code editor; it's an xsl/xsl editor, a code generator, a WYSIWYG database management tool, a rich deployment package creator. Coming in BizTalk 2004, VS.Net will also be an intuitive orchestration and map designer. Even the early Beta's, which I was fortunate to experiment with courtesy of an early adopter project at my client's site, showed a level of integration and sophistication that the Java toolset couldn't match (who cares if the Beta crashed when I tried to use context-sensitive help -- the feature was there and the release version ran fine!). Tools and development environment support has always been a strength for Microsoft and one lesson we can glean from this is that no matter how powerful your platform/language is, if developers can't efficiently and intuitively work with it, adoption suffers. Over the last year a blossoming of the .Net developer community in Hampton Roads has taken place. The friends I met at the original client (the one with the early adopter project) have mostly moved on but we still run in the same circles.
Paul Laudeman is now in Richmond, and initially turned me on to the blog-o-sphere many months ago. Darrell Norton just started working with Paul's company and helped start http://www.WeProgram.Net; rumour has it he's considering starting a Richmond .Net user group. Mark DiGiovanni, still in the immediate Hampton Roads area, also helped start http://www.WeProgram.Net. Jim Meeker, who I just met a few weeks ago at the WeProgram.Net user group meeting, is active in the local .Net community; I know he's very involved with http://www.hrssug.org/. There are many other great people in the area, but these are the only bloggers I know of.
The .Net community in Hampton Roads, while no rival to San Jose or Seattle, is steadily gaining momentum. For example, in October, IDesign's Brian Noyes is coming to talk about Architecture Patterns and I'm hoping we get a really good turn out (check here for details).