So it has been a while, but I do have a decent excuse. My son was born on the 16th of July, and I resolutely ignored everything for a while so I could soak up the experience!
This experience can also be linked to my intentions for my next series of blog posts – soaking up brand new experiences, and discovering new (and hopefully exciting) things!
I imagine a lot of readers find themselves in this situation: they work either by themselves, or for a company, writing software. They are handed a project, and given a strict budget / deadline. There is no moving it. So they set to work completing the project in the most efficient way they can within their current skillset. They complete the project on time, and then this cycle repeats itself.
And there is the crux of the issue. The developer gets a VERY refined skillset, but does not often get a chance to explore, to further his knowledge whilst being paid for it. This sort of exploration is necessary in this industry – if you don’t keep up you’re dead.
There has been a massive shift in web apps over the past couple of years, especially in regards to markup, project structure, communication and data structure and retrieval. I want to explore these regions – not just by reading some blogs or texts, but by creating a project that will leverage several key new Microsoft technologies, and actually exploring what they offer hands-on.
This means that there may be some rather *ahem* interesting results in some places, but such is as happens when doing new stuff!
The technologies I want to explore include, but are not limited to:
· ASP.NET MVC 2 (Including Razor)
· jQuery
· WCF Data Services
· Entity Framework 4
· CSS3 (Possibly – this is lower priority)
So along with this, I will be getting more familiar with .NET 4.0 and VS 2010, so if I find anything mentionable that I think hasn’t been covered well elsewhere, I’ll make sure to write about it.
Should be fun!
Print | posted on Friday, 6 August 2010 2:12 PM