Back in the saddle. Asp.net moderation and DotnetNuke Gallery module, here I go.
My daughter's birth caused major changes in my life. Unlike with my first child, I dedicated part of my day to take care of her. Last Thursday we celebrated her first birthday and I took some time to evaluate the impact the decision had on my professional life. I reduced the number of hours dedicated to programming, I dedicated fewer hours to reading technical books and, in general, I spent fewer hours in front of the computer. All of this obviously influenced the amount of time I had available to dedicate to community endeavors. The result was diminished participation in both the DotNetNuke web development platform as the Gallery Project Lead, and being almost absent from asp.net forums where I was an All-star poster as well as forum moderator.
The hours I enjoyed being near my little Renata have been really fulfilling and with renewed strength I decided to go back into my dedication to my preferred community activities. Starting today I've scheduled in my daily agenda some time to dedicate to moderating and replying to forum questions in the asp.net forum.
With the submission of the DotNetNuke Gallery module, I am also starting the planning phase of the next version. And even though I envision full leverage of newer technologies like Silverlight and JQuery to give the module the necessary visual "umph", I will be sharing vision with the rest of the team, continuing to experiment with an agile-like approach to development in this open-source distributed-team effort. AJAX is a no-brainer of course and the development of a DAL will be one of the most active areas of work.
If you are interested in DotNetNuke in general and the Gallery module specifically, I suggest you follow the respective project area over the DotNetNuke website, as most of the action related to the development of the next version will be visible in the Blog and Forums that reside there.
And yes, Renata is pictured at the top of this blog.