Looking Forward to 2006, Looking Back on 2005

As is my custom, I like to take a look back at the end of the year and check out what happened. I'm bringing y'all along for the ride.

 

Reviewing my blog, I see that I had one goal for 2005: ship FlexWikiPad 1.0. Well, that didn't happen. In fact, I didn't even do any significant work on it. Why not? Because I managed to push a couple of major projects onto the stack on top of it (bet you've never done that ;). For one thing, it seems I have to write a whole new text editor control (something I also didn't finish this year). But more significantly, I decided to completely overhaul the FlexWiki internal architecture to make it possible to implement security in a sane way.

 

Of course, I didn't finish that, either, but then again I didn't expect to. It's a pretty big job to do in my spare time, and along the way, it morphed into a decision to port FlexWiki to .NET 2.0. That is actually coming along fairly well, especially now that I try to spend an hour every day working on it. With luck, I'll have something to alpha status in month or two more.

 

It wasn't all FlexWiki work this past year, though. I had paying clients, too. My work at Integic redesigning and updating their main product has, after three years, reached code complete status. That's fairly exciting for me, because as a consultant I rarely get to see a project through from the very beginning. Even more interestingly, it looks like I'll be involved in working on the next phase as well, which means I'll get to see if some of our choices wind up helping us out like we hoped they would.

 

My other work in 2005 is still ongoing. I'm developing Pluralsight's new architecture course, for one. The research for that has been very educational, as I knew it would be. Hopefully I'll be able to pull the rest of the class together over the next few months.

 

Of course, my work on MSDN2 continues as well, but I can't say much about what I'm working on just yet. When we get it in place, you'll definitely hear about it, both here and elsewhere. I think it's something that readers of this blog will find interesting.

 

As you can see, 2006 is looking to be every bit as busy as 2005 was…and then some. I'm just glad my wife will be graduating from her MBA program in the spring.

 

I'll close with a list of my favorite/most significant events/posts of the year:

 

January

• Completed the build lights system for my client's project.


• Helped a reader with his ridiculously nerdy Halloween project.

 

February

• Posted about defaulted pluggable providers. I still use this all the time.

 

March

• Declared that I hate strong names.


• Released a new version of FlexWiki.

 

April

• Gave my take on the contract-first/code-first debate.


• Figured out how to make iTunes talk to MSN Messenger. I mention this one mostly because it appears to be the most popular arrival point for people that would never otherwise read my blog. :)

 

May

• I found out how easy it is to add macro support to your application.

 

June

• I ran into a nasty PerformanceCounter bug.


• I came across a cool trick: how to add guidelines to Visual Studio.

 

July

• I railed against people who create XML via string concatenation.

 

August

• I became a whore for rent. You should see the Google searches that post gets. :)

 

September

• I found out I'm in good company when I feel a bit overwhelmed.

 

October

• My daughter's first birthday! Yikes! How did that happen so fast?


• I discovered the wonder of System.Collections.ObjectModel. I use this namespace more and more now.

 

November

• November was not a great month. Could have been worse, though. A lot worse.


• I ran into this problem, which would have bitten me several times since if I hadn't gotten help from one of my smarter (specifically: smarter than me) friends.

 

December

• Attempted to catch up after the disaster that was November.


• Released another new version of FlexWiki.


• Figured out how to use a hand-rolled WSDL with ASP.NET web services.