2015 in Retrospective

Well, 2016 has arrived, time to look at 2015!

This was the year I was first awarded as Microsoft MVP – by the way, I got renewed! - and the year I left CRITICAL Software for Simplifydigital and started coming to London every month. A very exciting and challenging year indeed. Made lots of new friends and started using loads of new technologies. A lot was unsaid, but something got registered!

Here is my personal list of my favorite blog posts of the year, in no particular order (well, from recent to older):

• ASP.NET 5 Node Services;

• ASP.NET 5 View Components;

• Using ASP.NET 5 Tag Helpers and the Bing Translator API;

• The Evolution of .NET Dependency Resolution;

• Persisting SignalR Connections Across Page Reloads;

• Elastic Object Implementation in .NET;

• Local Machine Interprocess Communication with .NET;

• Profiling SQL Server in .NET;

• Case Study: Comparing ASP.NET Web Forms and MVC Implementations;

• Generating GDI+ Images for ASP.NET MVC Views;

• Open Source @ Microsoft;

• Windows Live Writer Tricks;

• ASP.NET Formatted String Control;

• Entity Framework Multitenancy;

• SharePoint XSLT Web Part;

• Visual Studio Tips;

• Hosting HTTP Resources;

• Java vs C# – Part 1;

• SQL Server Auditing;

• Generating GDI+ Images for the Web.

I can see some trends, not just in this list, but in all of the published posts:

• Moving to ASP.NET 5;
• Gradually dropping Web Forms in favor of MVC;
• More Entity Framework than NHibernate;
• Posts on plain .NET/C# instead of a particular API;
• Some contents on SharePoint too, which will probably continue;
• I wrote my first (and probably the last) posts on WPF/Silverlight, although I didn’t pick any for this list.

I also continued some of my “classic” topics:

• NHibernate Pitfalls Index;
• Lesser-Known NHibernate Features;
• Entity Framework Pitfalls Index;
• Unity Index;
• ASP.NET Extensibility Index:
• SharePoint Pitfalls Index.

And started new ones, which will continue throughout the year:

• Java vs C#;
• Visual Studio Tips;
• MongoDB with .NET;
• Interception in .NET.

Did a couple of book reviews for Packt Publishing and was even one of the technical reviewers of Learning NHibernate 4.

Also, I started to gather a list of portuguese (meaning, authored by portuguese people or written in portuguese) on development, but it has proven difficult. I will get back to this soon.

I had the chance to speak at a number of events:

• Entity Framework 7: What’s New? (Microsoft WebCamp 2015);

• Data Platform Airlift 2015 (on DocumentDB);

• Sessão Netponto: Entity Framework 7;

• Porto Tech Hub 2015 – Wrap Up (on Microsoft and Open Source);

• MVP Showcase 2015 – Wrap Up (on Entity Framework 7).

And my first article for Programar magazine was out, on ASP.NET 5, and even made the cover of the June edition!

Last but not least, I released another ebook on the Syncfusion Succinctly series: ASP.NET Multitenant Applications Succinctly Released. There will be some news on this later this year, stay tuned!

I have to thank all of my friends and colleagues (current and former) and all the great people at CRITICAL Software, Simplifydigital, Microsoft, Packt Publishing, Syncfusion, my MVP colleagues and all my friends in the Portuguese development communities that provided inspiration, friendship and support and who had the patience to put up with me!

Now, coming back to 2016, I can imagine I will be talking more about:

• ASP.NET 5 and MVC 6;
• Azure;
• SharePoint 2016;
• Entity Framework 7.x;
• MongoDB;
• ElasticSearch;
• SQL Server 2016;
• Docker;
• JavaScript frameworks;
• Node.js.

Well, that’s it. Have a great 2016 and keep dropping by! As always, I’d love to hear from you!