Thursday, July 17, 2008

Where to now?

Ok, so in the last two posts I bored you with my background, and some of the technologies I've dealt with over the years.

In the end though I've been around the block a few times and I've done the VBITS conference speaking kind of things, you probably won't know my name. I tend to be heads down, deep in the technologies, and do more private mentoring than shouting out loud.

I'm seriously enamored with a couple of things. First and foremost in my frontal cortex is Agile development practices, with a serious concentration in Scrum. I was able to go through Certified Scrum Master class a month ago and am rolling it out into my organization slowly, but steadily. Next week I'll be in Certified Scrum Product Owner class, and the following week in a 1 day "Agile Planning and Estimating", class presented by Mike Cohn. (Ought to be a CSE, Certified Scrum Estimating) . I'm starting to ramp up involvement in the Scrum Alliance.

I will be using this as my bully pulpit for my thoughts on Scrum. To a certified cowboy coder like me, who has hated all things process, this has hit me like a thunder storm. Scary, but oh so refreshing. One of my very best buds tried to get me to look at Scrum a couple of years ago, but my head and heart were just dead set against more process. I've been kicking my self and apologizing to him for a couple of months now.

Next is AJAX. I've done remote asynchronous calls from browser to server side methods without a full post back for years. But with the mash-up of technologies called AJAX, this is so much easier, more robust, and is going to be a huge enabling tool for web development in the future. I don't want to deprecate the use of the MS AJAX Toolkit. As a java script library, it's a very nice set of tools, but the true power of AJAX lays in the in the asynchronous nature of the technology.

Next on my list is WCF. I've been in an org for years that hasn't had a real need for an SOA, or the time and resources needed to deal with SOA and all the work it takes to put it together. Enter WCF and the encapsulation of all the plumbing necessary to do the grunt work, and let my dev team work on building business solutions.

Have a couple of books I'm working through. One great, and well one that's not worth the ink and paper it took to print is. The great one is "Programming WCF Services: Building SOAs with Windows Communication Foundation" from Juval Lowy.

So swing buy from time to time to listen to me rant. Technology, development, process are all on the table. Heck might even do a movie or book review or 2.

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