Looking Ahead to 2011–New Year Resolutions

Last year about this time I wrote a blog post where I called myself out and posted five things I wanted to get stronger at in 2010. Looking back, I think I did a decent job:

Silverlight Development – Safe to say I’ve been bit by the SL bug. I find I can be so much more productive building business apps with Silverlight than with other tools. I dove head first into Silverlight in learning some tips and tricks as well as adopting the MVVM design pattern (I prefer using the MVVM Light Toolkit).
WCF Development – I didn’t do much here aside from creating OData services, but I guess that kind of counts as WCF. I still need some work here… just didn’t have much of a need for it I guess…
PowerShell – Much stronger, but really want to dig in more. Still have to refer to a cheat sheet for some syntax stuff.
Visual Studio Extensibility – OK, so this was an area of great interest especially around SharePoint, but let’s face it. The guys who did the CKS:DEV project meet most of our needs. Why reinvent the wheel? I ditched this.
WPF Development – I did my fair share of utility apps in WPF, but I’m more a fan of SL as I find you get better reach that way. At any rate, everything you learn in SL basically applies to WPF so I guess I did a decent job here.

So, what’s on tap for 2011? Like I said last year, what better way to hold yourself accountable than to publically state your resolutions. These are all work related… the non-work related ones don’t really belong here but are arguably more important in life.

More Silverlight! Yup, I want to get even stronger here as I see Silverlight having a bright future. I’m not sold on HTML5 *yet* being something we should invest in (here come the flames) and expect Silverlight to be around for quite a while. Looking forward to learning more about transitions, animations & media in Silverlight in 2011! Also want to dive in deeper around the area of testing.
Enterprise Content Management & Web Content Management (SharePoint 2010) – I’ve been relatively silent in this area but have been working a good bit in it. Looking forward to writing a lot about it in 2011 on my blog. This will be a better vehicle than updating my SharePoint 2007 WCM book (which I don’t plan on doing).
SharePoint 2010 BCS – Aside from the ECM stack in SharePoint 2010 this is one of the more exciting / interesting aspects of the platform with huge potential.
Windows Phone 7 – Got a few apps I’m working on as moonlight projects, but nothing epic. Need to get up, wrap them up and publish.
More PowerShell & WCF Development – ‘Nuff said above.

Technorati Tags: 2010,2011,silverlight,sharepoint 2010,sharepoint,wcf,windows phone 7,wp7,wcm,ecm,bcs

posted on Wednesday, December 29, 2010 6:32 AM

Feedback

# Sad about the WCM book 12/29/2010 9:11 AM Andy Burns

It's sad to hear that you won't be updating the WCM book - it was one of my favourite developer-oriented SharePoint books. And I don't even do much WCM!

# re: Looking Ahead to 2011–New Year Resolutions 12/29/2010 11:49 AM MMB

You forgot to list run the River Run.

# re: Looking Ahead to 2011–New Year Resolutions 12/29/2010 1:24 PM AC [MVP SharePoint]

@Andy - Thanks for the kind comments... but let's face it. Not enough changed from 2007 to warrant another book (much less tha pain in writing it). :)
@Marshall - Not this year unfortunately. With what happened to my back in November, they said no way could I start training for a while.

Post Feedback

Title:
Name:
Email:	(email will not be displayed)
Url:
Comments:
Please add 5 and 7 and type the answer here: Remember Me?

All Comments Are Filtered & Moderated
Unfortunately comment spammers are just too effecient and are constantly dirtying up blogs with irrelevant and unwanted comments trying to improve their standing on search engines. All comments on this blog are moderated. I do not censor comments, but I don't approve comments with vulger language or those soliciting products. Most of the time comments are approved within a few hours of being submitted with the only exception when I'm traveling.

Why are you asking for my email address?
The only reason I'm asking for your email address, which isn't required to submit a comment, is to provide a gravatar if you've created an account for yourself and associated your email address with a small image. If you have a gravatar created for the email address you submit, it will appear next to your comment. Otherwise nothing will appear.

What is a gravatar?
A gravatar is a "globally recognized avatar." You can get more information about gravatars, as well as create your own for free, at www.gravatar.com. You can also view my gravatar here.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License