After 28 years, I quit … and move forward

I’m done … I quit!

As I posted on YouTube last week in the community area, I have an announcement to make. It’s a big step for me and a significant change in my life.

So here it is … after 28 years of working for the same employer, I quit my job and move forward. I won’t go into the exact details; I’d like to look forward and keep a positive mindset. You can follow me on LinkedIn to see if you are interested in my history (or even hook up; make sure you reference who you are and why you want to connect).

I like to work with tech and be on the bleeding edge of technology. I started as a junior software developer, first at a secondment agency doing short-term development jobs for various customers. After five years, someone reached out, and I joined one of the big accounting firms to work on their financial software systems. I learned much about financial systems then and even built an application that automatically created annual financial statements. Something accountants used to work on for weeks but could now be finished in a few days.

Moving forward, my work shifted from being a software developer to moving up the corporate ladder and sitting in meetings growing bigger development teams and, in the end, being more a People Manager than doing the things I loved to do: tinkering with software and extending software to provide better options for productivity to the Office or Information Workers.

I wanted a better job. Working in an increasingly restricted environment to avoid leaking information and being compliant with corporate standards kept me from doing what I love most: test-driving new technologies.

This reflects on family life, which is being grumpy after the daily drag. I even started to take time off one day a week – to work four days a week. I was beginning to look forward to my retirement.

Shortening my workweek allowed me to boost my YouTube and Twitch channels under the “Soft As In Software” umbrella, but I will discuss this later.

At that point, I received an email from a longtime friend living in the US, and he was asking me if VSTO (i.e., “Visual Studio Tools for the Office System”) is still a thing. A headhunter contacted him to see if he wanted to get a role in a specific job opening they were trying to fill.  As an answer to his question, I told him, “Honestly, not really …” as VSTO is in the process of deprecation (at least maintenance mode) and will soon be replaced by its successor, based on OfficeJS. Therefore, I advised him to suggest that the headhunter should look for a consultant to move the tooling into the OfficeJS APIs instead.

My friend didn’t accept the job offer as he is doing great stuff elsewhere already, but he thought sharing my info with the headhunter would be good. I confirmed that you could always talk, and he passed along my information so I could discuss what they were looking for and see where it would end. We eventually discussed the situation, agreed on the terms and conditions, had a couple more interviews, and agreed to move forward.

With all that in place, the announcement is that after a 28-year tenure, I resigned from my current job and started working for a company in Canada and the United States. It is a hundred percent remote job. I am curious if I ever travel in that direction. At least I still try to attend the big conferences such as Build (not this year, as it is poorly timed this year precisely on my already planned vacation), Ignite, and, while it lasts, the Annual Global MVP Summit with Microsoft to stay in contact with everyone.

As mentioned above in some wording, my work will start where I left off 10 to 15 years ago, maintaining big VSTO Add-ins that extend the Microsoft Office suite, especially for financial service workers. I am also looking into ways to migrate this to the new Office environment (or environments; I should say, as Office is multi-platform these days and can run not only on Windows but also on a Mac, iOS, Android, and more) to make it future-proof. I am confident that we can get this to work in the new context and be the number one provider of productivity tools for financial analysts.

As for my YouTube and Twitch channels, this also means that I need to shift things. My working hours changed from Central European Time (CET) or Central European Summer Time (CEST) in the summer to Eastern Standard Time (EST) or Eastern Daylight Time (EDT) in the summer. I will now work in the US time zone and move my leisure time to the morning in the EU. With that, my Live Coding sessions will shift from twice a week, 8 PM to 11 PM CEST, to three times a week, around 12 PM to 2 PM CEST for Europe and just before the day begins in New York (I guess 6 AM to 8 AM). I hope to make this five(!) times a week, every day… but I want to start slowly and use it to see how it will fit in.

Make sure your follow my YouTube Channel, so you won’t miss a thing. Learn with me in live sessions, make mistakes, stumble and get up!

Click here to go to my YouTube Channel and subscribe to get notified when going live:
Soft as in Software YouTube Channel

Visual Studio – Inline Hints

One of the hidden gems in Visual Studio is the option to enable Inline Hints. This will show little labels in your code to show what type of parameter is required for your functions, methods and what not. Also, it will show you what the return type is in case you assign the return value to a var typed variable:

Here is what it looks like in the editor:

Inline Parameter Name Hints
Inline Type Hints

To enable/disable Display Inline Hints you must go to Tools/Options/Text Editor/C#/Advanced and set the checks for Display inline parameter name hints and/or Display inline type hints.

Enable/Disable Display Inline Hints

This can help you coding in several ways. It allows you to immediately see what is expected so it makes it easier to understand what the code is doing, but it also allows you to refactor your code and make changes accordingly to match the hints or use named parameters.

It’s gems like these that make your life as coder much easier, especially if you adopt code from -another- developer where you need to understand what is happening in the existing code you adopted.

Enjoy!

SDN Event: Bill Ayers – Welcome to the Brave New World of SharePoint and Office 365 Development!

BillAyersI800

Second session in our series of October SDN Event recordings we released the first presentation by Bill Ayers from the event where he informs you about the evolution of SharePoint and Office 365 Development and where we are today with regards to these products.

Where to find:

https://youtu.be/MIGySwrI6tg

Abstract:

If your software development journey ever took you into the dark misty forest that is SharePoint development, there are two possibilities: you became a SharePoint developer or (more likely) you vowed never to go there again because of the dragons. But the forest is changing, the dragons are slain (mostly), and there is a new world of SharePoint and Office 365 development. Instead of building full-trust solutions that run in-process on the SharePoint server, we are moving to a model of client-side or remote-server development using a variety of technologies. Starting with SharePoint 2013 and Office 365 we have REST endpoints to support the rich client-side solutions our users want. In this talk we are going to see how far we can go using JavaScript and client-side development for Windows, web and mobile applications, and using ASP.NET MVC and other web development platforms. It’s time to take another look at SharePoint and Office 365 development. We can build sophisticated solutions that take advantage of the powerful back-end services that deliver business solutions through websites, desktop or mobile applications.

Don’t forget to subscribe to our YouTube Channel so you won’t miss the next sessions that we are about to post soon!
https://www.sdncast.nl/subscribe

Hit Refresh arrived on my Kindle today – Update

Hit Refresh Released

In my previous post around Hit Refresh, Satya Nadella’s just released book:

I mentioned:
BTW, it appears all Microsoft employees received a signed copy … maybe we can get him to sign a couple of them at the next MVP Summit!

Well apparently I was a bit early with preordering so now I already bought and received the book even though I was offered a complimentary copy of the book yesterday as well. So I lost my money on the book? Hell no, Satya is donating all of his proceeds from Hit Refresh to Microsoft Philanthropies.

I still would like to see the option to get Satya to sign a hardcopy for us at the next MVP Summit though … and given that it’s for a good cause I’d even buy the hardcopy to sign as well 🙂

SDN Cast 68 – DotNETConf en Google leaks

SDNCast 68-800

Conference season obviously started and the big three (Microsoft, Google and Apple) pop out events shortly after each other anxiously trying to be the first to come with new hardware announcements. Apple last week presented their new iPhones, at the end of October it is expected that Microsoft will come forward with -their- hardware announcements (although there is also the rumor that there will be another event in the middle of the month) and Google is planned for October 4th.

This week unexpected information was published about the hardware Google most likely planned to show at their October 4th event and probably not-amused to see all their scoops in a web post from one of the tech journalists. The new Pixel 2 devices, the new Google Pixelbook, a smaller smart speaker Google Home Mini and the new edition of their Daydream View VR headset.

Another one on the long list of upcoming events was DotNETConf online this week where Microsoft gave us an update on their development tools. An overview of what is going on with Visual Studio, Xamarin and Visual Studio Code, their light weight editor. Also updates on their languages and what is going on in the cloud with Azure.

We discussed it all in our weekly Dutch SDN Cast together with the news of the week, the rumors of tomorrow and the events on schedule. If you master the Dutch language go on over and watch the Dutch episode (on a weekly base so don’t forget to subscribe!) and in an hour you are completely up to date!

Where can you find our 68th episode of our Dutch SDN Cast?
https://youtu.be/5UYNxiBx2Vs

Our YouTube channel:
http://www.youtube.com/sdncast

Did you subscribe our Dutch SDN Cast channel already?

Subscribe your YouTube channel if you don’t want to miss a single broadcast. Usually we will broadcast on Thursday evenings at 8 PM but there can be a change of plans where we need to move to another time or day. So to be sure Subscribe to our channel on YouTube or go to http://www.sdncast.nl to see when the next episode is due.

Other news:

The final releases for iOS and tvOS will be available on September 19th. And the final release for macOS will be available on September 25th.
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2017/09/ios-11-available-tomorrow/

DotNETConf
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2017/09/19/watch-net-conf-2017/

Announcing: Windows Compatibility Pack for .NET Core
https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/dotnetConf/2017/K111

Architecture Guides
https://dot.net/architecture

Google Leaks before October 4
https://www.thurrott.com/mobile/android/135279/googles-big-announcements-leak-ahead-october-event

TFS 2017 Update 3 RC is available
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bharry/2017/09/19/tfs-2017-update-3-rc-is-available/

VSTS in Canada
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bharry/2017/09/18/vsts-in-canada/

VSTS Update – Sept 15
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bharry/2017/09/18/vsts-update-sept-15/

Apple

Newly Streamlined App Ratings
https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=09202017a

The All-new App Store is Here
https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=09192017c

Higher Limit for Over-the-Air Downloads
https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=09192017b

New Downloads Now Available
https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=09192017a

Snelstart Henry Been:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4qyPjNiYg5YlJGvw8nhvVw

Events

Events this Week

Xamarin Dev Days – September 16th – Amsterdam
https://ti.to/xamarin/dev-days-amsterdam-2017

DevIntersection Europe, September 18-20 – Stockholm
https://www.devintersectioneurope.com/#!

.NET Conf – September 19-21
http://www.dotnetconf.net/

Pluralsight Live, Salt Lake City, USA, 19-21 September
https://www.pluralsight.com/event-details/2017/live-2017

Building high performance web applications with Preact – September 21 – .NET Zuid – Rotterdam http://www.dotnetzuid.nl/Meeting/20/building-high-performance-web-applications-with-preact

Upcoming events

Microsoft Envision – September 25-27 – Orlando
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/envision/default.aspx

Ignite 2017 – September 25-29 – Orlando
https://ignite.microsoft.com
https://myignite.microsoft.com/sessions

Hybrid IT Event – September 26 – Maarssen, NL
http://www.fujitsu.com/nl/microsites/hybrid-it/event/index.html

4DotNet Events – Xamarin Event – 28 September, Nieuwegein
https://events.4dotnet.nl/xamarin-event

SDN Event 3 – October 6, Zeist, NL
https://www.sdn.nl/EVENTS/6-oktober-2017

OpenHack Amsterdam, October 9-11, Amsterdam
https://aka.ms/openhackamsinvite
Register:
https://www.microsoftevents.com/profile/form/index.cfm?PKformID=0x2564678abcd

Windows Developer Day – October 10
https://blogs.windows.com/buildingapps/2017/09/14/windows-developer-day-returns

TechDays October 12-13, 2017 RAI Amsterdam
http://www.techdays.nl/
https://techdays.msnlevents.net/content/eventselection.aspx?eventid=26152

SharePoint Saturday Belgium 2017, October 21, Brussels BE
http://www.spsevents.org/city/brussels/brussels2017

SharePoint Unite – October 24-26, 2017, Haarlem
https://sharepointunite.com/

Dev Intersection, October 30- November 2, Las Vegas
https://www.devintersection.com/#!/

Firebase Dev Summit – Amsterdam – October 31st
https://firebase.google.com/dev-summit-17/

Microsoft Future Decoded – London, UK – October 31st-November 1st
https://futuredecoded.com/

Azure IoT Community, November 2nd, Nieuwegein
http://www.azureiotcommunity.nl
https://www.eventbrite.nl/e/tickets-azure-iot-community-avond-bij-winvision-37965079575

Web Summit – November 6-9 2017, Lisbon, Portugal
https://websummit.com/

Visual Studio Live! November 12-17 2017 Orlando, FL
https://live360events.com/events/orlando-2017/vslive.aspx

MixUG – Eindgebruikers Evenement – November 29 – Gouda
https://www.eventbrite.nl/e/tickets-mixug-eindgebruikers-evenement-34890983872

NgEurope, February 1-2, 2018 , Paris – France
https://ngeurope.org/

As usual we are always looking for presenters for our own events and Meetup’s so if you want to share something about hot technologies or just about something you implemented at work or in an App that could be interesting to our audience let us know so we can schedule you for one or our next SDN events or Dutch .NET Group Meetups.

This off course also goes for if you want to write a great article for us to publish in our SDN Magazines or at our SDN Website. The downside of publishing a magazine article is that there can be sometime between writing the article and publishing the magazine. So, if it is time critical sometimes the best option is to publish it on the www.sdn.nl website to get more speedy attention to the article.

As you see, options enough to address your audience with top notch information. You can even, if you like, be our guest in our SDN Cast shows to discuss the projects you are working on or other topics you master. We will instruct you how to connect with us and what it is you need to join the show.

Hopefully we will see you at our weekly web cast, for the schedule go to www.sdncast.nl for next week’s announcement to find out the day and time of our next broadcast or go to www.sdncast.nl/youtube to watch old episodes and videos that we recorded at our events. Don’t forget to subscribe our YouTube channel www.sdncast.nl/subscribe or go directly to YouTube not to miss any of our shows!

SDN Cast 59 – Releases, Releases, Releases

clip_image002

Starting this week all regions in the Netherlands entered their school holiday season and everyone is dropping their work to leave the jobs to move into the sun.

Even so there still is a lot of news to discuss this week, especially a lot of software releases. I put them all below in the list, but just to name a few: The 3d tools called Babylon.JS 3.0 to create some amazing 3D apps, Postman, Cake and not to be forgotten the first release candidate of SQL Server 2017.

This and our other topics in our Dutch SDN Cast number 59 …

Where can you find our 59th episode of our Dutch SDN Cast?https://youtu.be/QBlk0Hod8jY

Did you subscribe our Dutch SDN Cast channel already?

Subscribe your YouTube channel if you don’t want to miss a single broadcast. Usually we will broadcast on Thursday evenings at 8 PM but there can be a change of plans where we need to move to another time or day. So to be sure Subscribe to our channel on YouTube or go to http://www.sdncast.nl to see when the next episode is due.

Other news:

C# 6.0 draft Language Specification
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/language-reference/language-specification/
https://github.com/dotnet/docs/tree/master/docs/csharp/language-reference

Announcing Babylon.js 3.0
https://blogs.windows.com/buildingapps/2017/07/12/announcing-babylon-js-3-0

Announcing .NET Summer Hackfest 2017
https://dotnetfoundation.org/blog/announcing-net-summer-hackfest-2017

Brady Gaster – Trying Something New
http://www.bradygaster.com/posts/trying-something-new

First release candidate of SQL Server 2017 now available
https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/dataplatforminsider/2017/07/17/first-release-candidate-of-sql-server-2017-now-available/

Rider Release Candidate: performance, refactorings, Unity and more!
https://blog.jetbrains.com/dotnet/2017/07/14/rider-release-candidate-performance-refactorings-unity/

Announcing Postman 5.0 – Pro features for free!
http://blog.getpostman.com/2017/07/14/announcing-postman-5-0-pro-features-for-free/

Cake v0.21.1 released
http://cakebuild.net/blog/2017/07/cake-v0.21.1-released

Windows 10 SDK Preview Build 16232 Released
https://blogs.windows.com/buildingapps/2017/07/12/windows-10-sdk-preview-build-16232-released/

VSTS Update – July 14
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bharry/2017/07/18/vsts-update-july-14/

New Release Definition Editor and improved pull request workflows – July 14
https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/articles/news/2017/jul-14-team-services

Nested Virtualization in Azure
https://azure.microsoft.com/nl-nl/blog/nested-virtualization-in-azure/

Events

This week’s events

Faculty Summit 2017: The Edge of AI – July 17,18 Redmond, WA
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/event/faculty-summit-2017/

Xamarin Dev Days – 22 July – Hengelo
https://ti.to/xamarin/dev-days-hengelo-2017/en

Upcoming events

Agile 2017 – August 7-11 2017, Orlando FL
https://www.agilealliance.org/agile2017/

Wazug – September 7 2017, Hilversum

Xamarin Dev Days – 16 September – Amsterdam
https://ti.to/xamarin/dev-days-amsterdam-2017

.NET Conf – 19-21 September
http://www.dotnetconf.net/

Ignite 2017 – September 25-29 – Orlando
https://ignite.microsoft.com

Hybrid IT Event – September 26 – Maarssen, NL
http://www.fujitsu.com/nl/microsites/hybrid-it/event/index.html

SDN Event 3 – 6 October 6, Zeist, NL
https://www.sdn.nl/EVENTS/6-oktober-2017

TechDays October 12-13, 2017 RAI Amsterdam
http://www.techdays.nl/
https://techdays.msnlevents.net/content/eventselection.aspx?eventid=26152

SharePoint Saturday Belgium 2017, October 21, Brussels BE
http://www.spsevents.org/city/brussels/brussels2017

SharePoint Unite – October 24-26, 2017, Haarlem
https://sharepointunite.com/

Web Summit – 6-9 November 2017, Lissabon, Portugal
https://websummit.com/

Visual Studio Live! November 12-17 2017 Orlando, FL
https://live360events.com/events/orlando-2017/vslive.aspx

As usual we are always looking for presenters for our own events and Meetup’s so if you want to share something about hot technologies or just about something you implemented at work or in an App that could be interesting to our audience let us know so we can schedule you for one or our next SDN events or Dutch .NET Group Meetups.

This off course also goes for if you want to write a great article for us to publish in our SDN Magazines or at our SDN Website. The downside of publishing a magazine article is that there can be some time between writing the article and publishing the magazine. So, if it is time critical sometimes the best option is to publish it on the www.sdn.nl website to get more speedy attention to the article.

As you see, options enough to address your audience with top notch information. You can even, if you like, be our guest in our SDN Cast shows to discuss the projects you are working on or other topics you master. We will instruct you how to connect with us and what it is you need to join the show.

Hopefully we will see you at our weekly web cast, for the schedule go to www.sdncast.nl for next week’s announcement to find out the day and time of our next broadcast or go to www.sdncast.nl/youtube to watch old episodes and videos that we recorded at our events. Don’t forget to subscribe our YouTube channel www.sdncast.nl/subscribe or go directly to YouTube not to miss any of our shows!

SDN Cast 58 – Inspire, API’s en Web Assembly

SDNCast 58-800

Last week it was the week of the Microsoft Partner Conference called Inspire, the conference where Microsoft invites all partners to come over to the special partner conference to get into the new fiscal year and to realign the partner plans for the upcoming year. It appears there is a slight change in policy where the Microsoft wants to include the partners more in their sales flow for selling their cloud products like Azure and Office 365. In previous years much of the sales was often done directly through Microsoft. The new strategy is to include the partners more in this process sharing the revenue processed by these sales initiatives. An important change is thinking in scenarios of specific industries.

Microsoft was always very much integrated at the level of the technology specialists, but when it came to selling the product at the board level there was an issue. The new strategy is to explain more how Microsoft fits in the process of the business itself. How can they extend their services in a way where the business improves by providing better quality and better services to their customers together with Microsoft.

New was the announcement to bring Microsoft 365 to the market for business and enterprise subscribers. An extension to the Office 365 program where Windows is now included next to several other services like security services. In our Dutch webcast we dive into this, this week.

This week we also bring the annual list of free e-books published by one of the Microsoft guys who made a hobby of collecting all the available free e-books and this is a huge list by now! Look at the links from the show-notes below for the URL to get the e-books. The link also contains a couple of links for instance to download the full list to your local machine. Not that this is advised, it really is a huge amount of data to pull in, but if you really want you can do it.

Also two AI APIs became available, one for General Availability (the Bing Entity Search API) and one in preview (Project Prague). The links are like all others in the list below. We discussed the APIs in depth, but in Dutch … sorry for that .

Fanie prepared another demo for us, and this week he is showing the Web Assembly and what you can do with it. If you want to explore by yourself here are some links:

WebAssembly Community Group

https://www.w3.org/community/webassembly/

Github:

https://github.com/webassembly

Where can you find our 58th episode of our Dutch SDN Cast?

https://youtu.be/TuNcLjT1RlA

Did you subscribe our Dutch SDN Cast channel already?

Subscribe your YouTube channel if you don’t want to miss a single broadcast. Usually we will broadcast on Thursday evenings at 8 PM but there can be a change of plans where we need to move to another time or day. So to be sure Subscribe to our channel on YouTube or go to http://www.sdncast.nl to see when the next episode is due.

Other news:

 

More layoffs
https://www.scribd.com/document/35351…

Community Leader Zone
http://clzinvite.kickoffpages.com/?ki…

Largest FREE Microsoft eBook Giveaway
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/mssm…

Introducing Microsoft 365
https://blogs.office.com/en-us/2017/0…
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/micro…
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/micro…

Announcing UWP Community Toolkit 1.5
https://blogs.windows.com/buildingapp…

Samsung Releases 4th Preview of Visual Studio Tools for Tizen including support for .NET Core 2.0 Preview
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/visu…

The State of Developer Ecosystem in 2017
https://www.jetbrains.com/research/de…
https://insights.stackoverflow.com/su…

Calling all game devs: The Dream.Build.Play 2017 Challenge is Here!
https://blogs.windows.com/buildingapp…

Bring rich knowledge of people, places, things and local businesses to your apps
https://blogs.bing.com/search-quality…

Project Prague
https://labs.cognitive.microsoft.com/…

Events

This week’s events

Inspire July, 9-13 – Washington D.C.
https://partner.microsoft.com/en-us/inspire/
https://partner.microsoft.com/en-us/inspire/sessions

Next Week events

Faculty Summit 2017: The Edge of AI – July 17,18 Redmond, WA
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/event/faculty-summit-2017/

Upcoming events

Agile 2017 – August 7-11 2017, Orlando FL

https://www.agilealliance.org/agile2017/

Wazug – September 7 2017, Hilversum

Ignite 2017 – September 25-29 – Orlando
https://ignite.microsoft.com

Hybrid IT Event – September 26 – Maarssen, NL
https://events.global.fujitsu.com/r7/runtime/fujitsu/events/registration.php?event=raqvmqdf125d&l=en&s=login&ref_s=registration

SDN Event 3 – 6 October 6, Zeist, NL

https://www.sdn.nl/EVENTS/6-oktober-2017

TechDays October 12-13, 2017 RAI Amsterdam

http://www.techdays.nl/
https://techdays.msnlevents.net/content/eventselection.aspx?eventid=26152

SharePoint Unite – October 24-26 2017, Haarlem

https://sharepointunite.com/

Visual Studio Live! November 12-17 2017 Orlando, FL

https://live360events.com/events/orlando-2017/vslive.aspx

As usual we are always looking for presenters for our own events and Meetup’s so if you want to share something about hot technologies or just about something you implemented at work or in an App that could be interesting to our audience let us know so we can schedule you for one or our next SDN events or Dutch .NET Group Meetups.

This off course also goes for if you want to write a great article for us to publish in our SDN Magazines or at our SDN Website. The downside of publishing a magazine article is that there can be some time between writing the article and publishing the magazine. So, if it is time critical sometimes the best option is to publish it on the www.sdn.nl website to get more speedy attention to the article.

As you see, options enough to address your audience with top notch information. You can even, if you like, be our guest in our SDN Cast shows to discuss the projects you are working on or other topics you master. We will instruct you how to connect with us and what it is you need to join the show.

Hopefully we will see you at our weekly web cast, for the schedule go to www.sdncast.nl for next week’s announcement to find out the day and time of our next broadcast or go to www.sdncast.nl/youtube to watch old episodes and videos that we recorded at our events. Don’t forget to subscribe our YouTube channel www.sdncast.nl/subscribe or go directly to YouTube not to miss any of our shows!

A new year with new opportunities

2014

2014 Is almost in its second week now and already I am so busy doing things, work related but also in my personal space, that I didn’t get to even write an opening blog post for 2014 up to now. And that has to change. 2013 has been a rollercoaster of events where I allowed myself to get only a couple of hours of sleep each day to get things at least going in the right direction (except my work-life balance of course).

Some of the 2013 event highlights:

  • Re-awarded Microsoft MVP for VSTO for 2013
  • Two (!) MVP Global Summits
  • Spent a month in Orlando, Florida
  • Build 2013 Conference
  • At work moved thousands, all of the NL firm, laptops from Windows 7/Office 2010 to Windows 8/Office 2013

Especially the last item kicked in hard. Moving from Office 2010 to Office 2013 wasn’t (and still isn’t) a smooth ride. One of our biggest projects was depending on XMLNode structures in Office but that feature was all the sudden removed from Office due to a lost legal issue between Microsoft and a third party from Canada. As this happened we were now forced to do a complete rewrite of our code to get around this.

What’s up for 2014?

Of course the air hasn’t completely cleared yet from the fireworks smoke, so obviously not all that will happen in 2014 is known or pre-announced, always the element of surprise – that’s life, but here are some things to be expected for 2014:

  • Re-awarded Microsoft MVP for VSTO for 2014
    Already happened, I received a message from Microsoft congratulating me with the 2014 MVP Award!
  • MVP Global Summit (I think only one this year…)
  • Build 2014 Conference
  • Still a lot to do at work projects, getting feature complete and extend, add new features on the new platform
  • Move most of my home servers into the cloud
    I still have a lot of servers running at home giving me headaches for either the management of all servers (they always tend to break when I’m traveling) or the energy bills from the utility services so it is about time to move it all to Windows Azure if possible.
  • Try to act a bit more healthy
    In 2013 I started, supported by the FitBit Flex, to walk a daily amount of 10K steps. That was a good start, I still do that every day and lost about 11 kilos (24lbs) in weight. There is however the issue of not getting enough sleep! Hopefully there is somewhat less pressure on our projects to get closer to about 8 hours of sleep a day.
  • Roslyn integration in Visual Studio?
    We’ve seen the first signs from Roslyn for VB.NET and C# in public presentations at the end of 2013. Will 2014 be the big year for Roslyn to be deployed to general public?
  • Visual Studio 2014?
  • SDN Events and Magazines
    Also for the Dutch Software Development Network another year of events and magazines we want to hand to the developer community. Always looking for new articles and presentations so if you want to share, let me know!
  • Learn! Always continue to learn something new, if you stop learning you stop living. Some great resources: WintellectNow, PluralSight, Channel 9, Microsoft Virtual Academy and many more!

Showtime

As a reminder for my own benefit, but hopefully also interesting enough for others to read I want to add to each blog post a small section on movies I’ve seen at the time of writing the blog post.

Captain Phillips

Captain Phillips
In 2014 our local cinema introduced for the first time a fixed subscription to visit the movies for a monthly price. A so called all you can watch subscription that I have been bugging them for for years so I had to jump in once the opportunity arrived.

The first movie that I did go to with my new ‘Platinum Pas’ was Captain Phillips. A movie about the true story of Captain Phillips (Tom Hanks) about the 2009 hijacking of his cargo ship while crossing international waters next to Africa by a couple of Somali pirates.

The movie is an absolute thriller and while ‘under the command’ of the Somali pirates there was no way to expect what these guys had in mind with the US crew and/or with the cargo ship. With help of the US Navy they tried to get the ship back and get away from the African risk areas.

Besides being a thrilling movie there also was this excellent part in the movie that was showing the human side of the event, eventually finishing in the emotional breakdown of Captain Phillips releasing all his emotions that he so far kept for himself. Usually these movies stop after being released from the bad guys but this one did continue for another twenty minutes to ‘get it all in the open’. Nine points out of Ten.

Give feedback!

If I haven’t told you before, let me know what you think! If you think things are completely off – different – or have another opinion? Sure, always an option… write it in the comments and get a discussion started. It’s a free world (at least I tend to think so) so let me hear from you all!