Yes, I’m still here….

So, you may have noticed that it’s been about 6 months since my last post.  I’ve been a little busy.  I’ve also been learning heaps.

Since my last post I’ve had a couple of opportunities to use my new-found C#/.Net skills at work.  Since early December I’ve been neck-deep in ASP.Net MVC, working on a new web-based workflow application to streamline my company’s recruitment process.  I’ve been having a lot of fun learning about MVC (I’d previously only worked with ASP classic in VB) including writing custom model binders and HTML helpers (more on those in future posts).  I’ve also delved into Entity Framework, and then ended up in nHibernate because we run Oracle databases on the back-end.

I feel like I’m starting to get my head around this whole .NET universe, and I’ve been helped a lot along the way a couple of must-listen podcasts - .NET Rocks! and Hanselminutes.  Every week listening to these two great shows I’ve discovered tools to make the development process easier, or been exposed to technologies that I wouldn’t have otherwise known about. 

So, where to now?  Well, I’ve lost my desire to finish the series on programming exercises that I’ve been working through.  I’ve got a bunch of ideas for posts based on things that I’ve been learning at work.  These will necessarily be more technical than my posts to date, but I hope that newer programmers will still find them useful, even if it’s just to get a feel for the sort of stuff that’s possible.  I’ve also got an idea for a little project I’d like to pursue, which I will probably end up open-sourcing, and that will probably provide plenty of topics for new posts.

Having said that, my last post was the second of a 4 or 5 post series covering my solution to the problem of developing a scientific calculator.  I don’t really want to leave that hanging so I’ll finish the series off before I take this blog in new directions.  And who knows, there may be times in the future when I’m running low on inspiration, and I’ll come back to these exercises just for fun.