Over the last two years some interesting things have happened in the .net community, among these things I would like to highlight the followings:

• Greater interest in Domain Driven Design in contrast to the traditional MSDN Data driven way. This has stimulated the adoption of certain design techniques like DI and AOP among other.
• As a consequence of the previous point there has been a wider adoption and diffusion of open source tools (beyond the P&P application blocks). Tools like NHibernate, Castle and Spring.Net have proven to be high quality products providing efficient solutions for typical problems in enterprise development. Event Microsoft (in a certain way) has recognized these facts, I think ASP.NET MVC is an example of this.
• Massive adoption of agile development practices like continous integration, unit testing, pair programming and iterative development among others.

I think that evidence of these facts are the creation of the ALT.NET community and the publication of the excellent book “Foundations of Programming” by Karl Seguin.
I see this as great progress for the maturity of the community and the quality of its developments.