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What developer technologies are you experimenting with?

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I'm curious to hear which developer technologies (both from Microsoft and everyone else) you've checked out recently. 

As you can see from my blog, I spent a good bit of time last month playing with XNA and was very impressed.  I've recently been splitting time between the Windows Live services (Local, Messenger, Activities), and some of what's new in Visual Studio "Orcas" - particularly Linq.

But it's a full-time job keeping up with everything that's new.  For instance, I still haven't done a project with the Expression Blend release candidate, and it looks like the new samples are dazzling.  And there are lots of web technologies (Ruby, etc., WPF/E, and countless others) that are getting a lot of buzz, and I haven't had a chance to play with all of them myself.

So I'd love to hear what you've been exploring yourself, and what your impressions were.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    April 04, 2007
    First, I really like your new logo with the Moose! Excellent! In 2007 I've been playing with the following technology:
  • Vista Sidebar Gadgets (with .NET Interop)
  • WPF (currently reading WPF Unleashed from MS Press)
  • AJAX (actually been building real apps with AJAX)
  • IIS 7.0 (awsome new webserver, did a series of talks on IIS7 in February)
  • Outlook 2007 Mobile Services (implementing free SMS messages in Outlook 2007 using OMS)
  • C and Microcontroller programming (been doing some old school stuff as well, taking a micro controller course at university building a Pong game in C)
  • Windows Vista Media Center (did some plugins in Reading in january) Things I havent played with:
  • XNA (I have some cool ideas, but limited time...)
  • Windows Workflow (I want to do more "real world" stuff, and get a solid understanding on how to use WF)
  • WCF (Still stuck with plain old ASMX'es...)
  • Media Center Markup Language (Only done XBAP inside Vista MCE)
  • Orcas and LINQ (I played with the May 2006 CTP, need to pick it up again) Tools I've used:
  • Expression Web (Excellent tool for gadget development, blogpost on this comming)
  • NDepend (Excellent tool for static code analazys of assembly dependencies etc. Let's you write SQL-like queries agains your code. Can for instance make a build fail if you have less than 20% comments etc).
  • Sysinternal Tools (Been doing some "hard" debugging the last couple of months. The sysinternals stuff is just amazing.)
  • SQL Publishing Wizard (Excellent tool to deploy databases) Happy easter Rob!

  • Anonymous
    April 04, 2007
    Jonas - thanks for the note and happy Easter to you as well! See... the length of your list is exactly what I mean... it's just so hard to get a chance to experiment with everything. What's the Media Center development like?  I haven't done that yet.  You mention doing XBAP development - can you write WPF XBAP apps that run on Media Center as extensions?  I didn't know that. I am with you on WF - I haven't found a real-world scenario yet where I wanted to use it.  I thought if I ever did a rewrite of Little Syncr in .NET 3.0 I would use WF in the sync engine.  Never found the evening though. You've done Messenger bots, right?  Which framework would you recommend using?  That's one of the things I'd love to try my hand at: Messenger Bot + Messenger Activity.

  • Anonymous
    April 04, 2007
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    April 04, 2007
    Man, thanks so much for the note and the tips.  OK, I'm headed home and I'll check out the Bot SDK you mention.  And you're so right, the list shows you can't be on top of everything, but it's not a depressing thought... it just means there are endless projects to embark on!  (Now, if only I could complete the Oblivion Shivering Isles expansion, I'd free up a bit of time to do more of this :) )

  • Anonymous
    April 05, 2007
    The comment has been removed