Looking Ahead to 2010 – New Year’s Resolutions

What better way to hold yourself accountable than to publically state what your New Year’s Resolutions are? I’ve got a few professional & personal resolutions but only care to share my professional ones here (there’s a reason why they are called “personal” right?).

I’m the kind of person that can fill up a to do list with all these ambitious things you want to accomplish, but if I don’t give myself a deadline or carve out time on my calendar, it won’t get done. So this year I’m picking just a few things and giving myself a month to knock it out. I usually get up around 5a when I’m at home to get a few hours of work done before the rest of the family gets up. Then I take a break and spend time with them until the kids head to school/etc. This is the ideal time to work on these things as it’s when I’m most fresh… so here it goes… things I want to get stronger at in 2010 (no shocker they all have a SharePoint correlation):

Silverlight development – I managed to push off the Silverlight bug until just a few months ago, but now that I’m spending more time in it, I really like it. I’d like to get stronger at using the Expression Studio suite of tools to make more compelling UI’s and effects.
WCF development – Today I get by just fine, but I can’t slam something out real fast. Why? I just haven’t needed it… so I’d like to add that to my tool belt.
PowerShell – I absolutely love PowerShell, but I’m not as strong with it as it’d like to be. For instance, when doing general stuff on my machine or in SharePoint, I’d like PowerShell to be the first place I go for stuff, as well as building my own cmdlets, snapins and profiles.
Visual Studio extensibility – I’ve got *tons* of ideas on how we can extend Visual Studio above and beyond what we have today for SharePoint development.
WPF development – Since I live in the Web space I had almost zero use for building my own client apps. But I would like to get a bit more proficient. Like Silverlight, once I played with it a bit using the current tools, I really like the experience more than what we had in Windows Forms world.

What’s on your plate for 2010?

Technorati Tags: 2010,silverlight,wpf,wcf,powershell,visual studio 2010

posted on Thursday, December 31, 2009 3:03 PM

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# re: Looking Ahead to 2010 – New Year’s Resolutions 12/31/2009 3:20 PM Sam Larko

Other than hopefully reaping the rewards from your resolutions that you may share here...

I'd like to learn more about Studio/Office/SharePoint 2010. I'm hoping to do a company-wide Office/SP upgrade late summer/early fall, so it would have to be pretty quick.

I'd also like to learn more about the power behind Central Admin. I've never considered myself an Administrator, but I'm wearing that hat. What are Information Policies and how should I use them? Should I set site quotas? Is there an easy way to add in, and migrate to, new Content Databases?

On a semi-personal/semi-professional side, I'm starting my Masters in IT next week. I actually want to do well instead of just coasting through like I did with my undergrad.

# re: Looking Ahead to 2010 – New Year’s Resolutions 12/31/2009 7:16 PM Marshall Harrison

Great idea AC.

I have so many things I want to do that putting them out in a public blog is a good idea. With billable hours eating up the bulk of my time and then family it is hard to find time to learn new stuff and become proficient. Making things public will put the pressure on me.

I'll blog something in the next day or so.

# re: Looking Ahead to 2010 – New Year’s Resolutions 1/5/2010 10:16 AM Amrish Tandon

Happy New Year to all!

My aim for the year is to get certified in SharePoint development. I am relatively new to SharePoint and am looking for cetification as a learning mechanism and career enhancer.

That being said what is everyones opinion on the MS sharepoint certification test?

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