Reviewing This Year's Goals (2009)

Back in January, I created this post focusing around what I was hoping to accomplish this year.  I was going through my old posts and stumbled across it.  I figured it would be a good time to look over them once again to gauge my progress along with what else I may have done so far this year.

 

Learn F#:

While I do not claim to be an authority of F# by any means, I do feel comfortable in saying that I learned the bulk of the language and be able to determine where it makes sense to use it.  If time allows, I can see myself using it more and more; however, for right now, I've definitely learned a lot from such and can focus on learning other things.

 

Learn DDD:

This one I am really only about 1/2 done with.  While I have went through the information and can understand the concepts involved, I haven't had a good way of applying such yet.  There's existing applications that could benefit from the practices of DDD; but I haven't pushed myself into applying such on a new project yet.

 

Learn Silverlight 2:

I got sidetracked and ended up procrastinated on this one.  While I wanted to learn SL2, I still was a bit apathetic towards it since SL1 wasn't very impressive to me.  Thankfully, I've seen a lot of what Silverlight 3 can do and am going all out on learning more about it.  Except some posts on Silverlight 3 soon.

 

Other Things:

So what else have I been up to so far this year?  Looking back I have worked on some open source projects (namely my SchemaSpy Task for NAnt and contributing to .Net Migrations over on codeplex).  I've also focused a lot of time on keeping up to date on .Net 3.5 and other technologies that I wasn't able to fully take advantage of at a previous employer.  Lastly, I've really been focusing on TDD and just writing better code in general.  There's always room for improvements but being able to learn from what's being talked about over the past year is what's important.

 

Things on the Horizon...

Learning MEF:

The Microsoft Extensibility Framework (MEF) provides some great opportunities to make very extensible applications.  With a need to make a project extensible, I'm definitely going to be focusing on understanding MEF more.

 

Learning Silverlight 3:

I'm already in the process of working in Silverlight 3 but I have only started to write applications with such.  Just like a person who has finished their first true ASP.Net application, there's always room for improvements and things that one can learn to make things better.  I'm at that stage where there's a lot more I can learn about and I'm all for it since Silverlight 3 is awesome.

 

More SchemaSpy:

My SchemaSpy post earlier this year is one of my highest trafficked posts as well as one that I refer back to all of the time.  I'm planning on answering a few outstanding questions associated with that post and also see what else I can do with the tool to make things easier for everyone.

 

<Unknown> Things:

I always leave myself open to the unknown and unforeseen opportunities.  While November and December are usually swamped for me, I never know when inspiration will hit me and I learn something new.