Well, the launch of the bulk of the client sites we were working on throughout May/June has left me with a weeks holiday – yay! I’m more determined than ever to spend it learning – busman's holiday I guess, though I’d feel like I’d wasted the week if I sat playing on the consoles or just bumming around – I’m sure catching up on sleep will help too.
I’m really enjoying the learning that I can get from just an hour of reading through stackoverflow or those peoples tweets that I follow, key over the next week is focussing this and getting some more technical contacts to learn from – there are some cracking recent ones including @spolsky, @elijahmanor, and @scottgu – and just getting time to read all about it will be bliss.
I finally asked my first question on stackoverflow the other week and thankfully it was well received. Polymorphism in c# has always for me been a timtowdi concept, and although I’ve not had significant need for it in the past, I’ve always liked the flexibility interfaces give in implementation. Thankfully the answers seemed to back that up, and give some good concrete examples. So nice to know there is a community around like this that will happily offer support/views, and ultimately can lead to a ‘best practice’ guide on issues. Of course, we’ll ignore the ‘answering without reading the question’, and all the other minor issues SO has – on the whole, a cracking resource.
So, fingers crossed this will again be the start of regular posting – this next week is working through the MCTS training kit and just learning more, doing more – key areas I have to focus on really are build management (NANT), WPF (for MCTS and curiosity more than anything), Design Patterns (I’ve only really used the Facade in anger, but there is so much discussion at present about IoC and Dependency Injection that I have to have a read).
I want to be playing with Linq (the elements I’ve played with so far highlight how seriously powerful it is if used carefully) and other more ‘hands on’ elements, though I think getting that grounding right is first and foremost.
More to follow during this weeks ‘holiday’ :)