At this halfway point of the year, I thought it would behoove me to examine how I'm doing on my programming goals for this year. Back in January, I wrote down some things I wanted to work on this year. I didn't publish it, so you'll just have to trust me when I say that those things were:
- Write more unit tests for my home projects.
- Start migrating towards Microsoft Visual Studio 2008. Install at work, too, though I doubt I'll be able to use it for anything but experimentation.
- Learn the basics of LINQ without sacrificing my SQL skills.
- Learn what the heck Windows Workflow Foundation is and why Microsoft thinks it's useful.
- See if Windows Presentation Foundation is really superior to WinForms or just "different."
Results So Far
"Write more unit tests for my home projects." I haven't done very well on this one.
"Start migrating towards Microsoft Visual Studio 2008." I have been using VS2008 exclusively at home since February, but I'm still stuck with VS2005 at work.
"Learn the basics of LINQ without sacrificing my SQL skills." Have done nothing on this yet, although I recently identified a place in one of my projects that would be a good place to start learning.
"Learn what the heck Windows Workflow Foundation is and why Microsoft thinks it's useful." I did a cursory examination of it, but I do not yet know why Microsoft thinks I should spend valuable time learning it. Am still not clear why a "workflow" is any different from a "program."
"See if Windows Presentation Foundation is really superior to WinForms or just 'different.'" I ported an old .NET 1.1 project to WPF and found it an enjoyable experience, although VS2008's WPF support doesn't feel very mature to me yet.
Revised Goals For 2008
I will now revise my list for the rest of the year.
- Learn the basics of LINQ without sacrificing my SQL skills. I think this will be a useful job skill, but it is still imperative that SQL remain the top priority.
- Acquire Microsoft MCTS certification. I have been putting off studying forever, so I'm going to have to just go ahead and schedule a test to force myself to study.
- Learn some Silverlight basics.
- Learn some Flash basics. In all my web development years, I've never had an occasion to create a Flash animation.
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