Summary of the year 2008

Another quite year of blogging, though the last quarter this blog was somewhat resurrected.

It has been 2.5 years since I started working on Validata product. The last year was moderately interesting one,. I worked on various staff, the most notable of which are an HTTP load testing tool (pretty challenging task) and a language parser using ANTLR (just for a week). I also continued to work on our web application and a couple of desktop applications. I feel good that some my ideas finally were implemented and went in production. Also I think my efforts to improve our development process start to pay off...

Unfortunately my pet project with ActiveRecord, Monorail, MySql, JQuery that I got started was put on hold in february, but still it was a good learning experience. After getting to know Monorail, now I quickly got was ASP.NET MVC all about.

Next year, I plan to become an MCTS (I think my company finds more value in those certifications, than I do), so I am starting with 70-536. As a matter of fact, this morning I finally took a practice test from the training kit. I expected to top it without reading a word from the training book, but wishful thinking did not suffice :) I realized that there are areas of the .NET Framework that I don't know enough about i.e. .NET Security, WMI, Interoperability. I wonder if I concentrate only on those areas, will this be enough to pass the exam. Having solid 4 years experience in the .NET world should be a good starting point, so reading a few chapters for a couple of days might be exactly what I need.