Monday, March 21, 2011

What I have been upto

I haven't been blogging much lately... just posting activity updates of our .NET User Group. What I have been upto?  I have been:
  • Learning Silverlight
    • I have made several attempts to learn SL in the past, but for some obvious and not-so obvious reasons, I had to drop it. The obvious reason was for the fact that SL was not "enterprise" ready. But this time, I have had it all sorted out. With the SL4.0 being out, and Windows Phone 7 supporting SL4.0 development, it made quite sense (yes, I am not out of it yet :)) to get into the SL bandwagon (is there one?). I am reading mainly from the Wrox book and from the blogs around.
  • Learning C#
    • Ha.... I have been a VB(.NET) guy for long. I still am. But the world does not seem friendly enough to VB.NET developers. Almost all the articles that I read are of C#. I read C# pretty fluently, but my coding skills are still immature when it comes to this language. There is one truth that we VB.NET developers do not like to admit - C# is (going to be) the de-facto language of .NET. In my travel around the blogosphere and the web, I see more and more applications being written in C#. I have decided to break the barrier and learn it and make it my primary language of choice.
  • Learning MVVM
    • If you know Silverlight, it is understood that you know MVVM (Model View ViewModel) also. They go along so well. This became more and more clear when I attended the Get DevReady with MVVM session by Miguel Castro at Malvern PA. I am reading Josh Smith's article as my primary resource.
So, all the three at the same time. Hmmm... its fun! :)

On the side, I am developing an app in SL4.0, to apply what I have learned. Every week I try to do something with what I learn. This is a slow process for now, but I am getting there...  The world of XAML is pretty wonderful... As I said before, it makes easy things hard and hard things easier.

Expect more Silverlight related posts.... yeah... coming soon!

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