Switch… On…

Happy new year everyone!!!

Admitted, I’m a bit late with my best wishes this year, but I spent some time recently looking for some crazy adventures in Asia.  Now that I finally found some stable ground under my feet again and with it, the time to blog, I thought my first blog of this year, the sentimental fool that I am, was a good time to reflect on some highlights of an amazing 2012.

Community-wise, my year started off well when I met Beth Massi early 2012, got introduced to some people by Michael Washington somewhat later (which led to the Leading LightSwitch column in MSDN magazine, which was abruptly stopped because of health reasons but will be continued this year), got to do a few live sessions (but not enough) about my addiction, and made a coffee drinking date with my fellow-LightSwitch-hacker Paul Van Bladel.  Although we never got around to actually meeting last year, we started partnering in crime this year starting with a succinct session on LightSwitch end of Februari.

Speaking of “Succinctly”, a shoutout to my friends over at Syncfusion is in order.  Not only did they light up my LightSwitch apps with great (and free) metro icons, they also provided me the opportunity to author my first eBook: LightSwitch succinctly.  It took me quite some late nights to write it, but I enjoyed every moment and I’m a proud parent of my firstborn little book.  A couple of people already shared with me that they enjoyed reading it too, both as an introduction to LightSwitch or to introduce other people.  All of their eBooks are quite good, my personal favorites being JavaScript and JQuery Succinctly.   In “the time it takes to drink a couple of cups of coffee”, they refreshed my knowledge of those technologies, just in time for the LightSwitch HTML preview 2 to finish installing.  Which is as close to “succinct” as you can get, imho.  (As a non-native English writer, I had to look up what it means, lol).

 

Last year also had a couple of unpleasant surprises for me personally, but I learned and gained strength from the experience, and I’m ready to start a year with (hopefully) even bigger events than last year…

Besides blogging, I’m hoping to get a first version of my new extension ready soon.  I’ve been working on it since 2011, when I get a couple of hours to spare (which isn’t a lot), continually changing strategy as I learn from my LightSwitch consultancy projects what the developer community truly needs, and to try and keep up with with the ever changing LightSwitch product…  Hopefully, you’ll like it a lot.  Hopefully, one day I’ll be able to do just that: blog, give sessions, create sample projects and create extensions.  Now that would be a good year!

Meanwhile though, while I wait for that winning lottery ticket, there’s plenty of fun projects that need my attention right now…

Happy new year everyone! I hope you have a great 2013, meet lots of fun people, make tons of money, have a good health, and as always… Keep rocking LS!