David Pallmann's Blog: General

2005: Year in Review

Tue, 17 Jan 2006 18:26:02 GMT

2005 was a year of change for me and my family.

In May I turned in the last of my manuscript for my third book, Programming Indigo, marking the end of a year-long effort to write about an interesting technology that has also been something of a moving target. There will be many WCF books that follow in its wake, but I'm glad to have gotten something out there to help early adopters of beta 1. WCF has of course continued to change since then.

I also made a mid-year decision to leave Microsoft and the Northwest in exchange for a principal consultant position at Microsoft partner Neudesic in Southern California, where I'd lived previously. That meant moving my family, again, and selling our house, again, and finding a new house, again. For the last time, we hope. I couldn't be happier about my present situation. My family and I are living in an area we love, and I get to do architect-level work while working with extremely gifted people. Life is good.

The busyness of relocation has interfered with keeping this blog up to date with the latest WCF developments, although I've done my best to respond to anyone who contacted me directly. You can expect a much greater posting frequency in 2006, especially now that I've found a place to post files that my blog can liink to. (My pet peeve with blogs is they let you post photos but nothing else.)

This was also a year when I invested in learning new technologies or improving my knowledge of existing ones. Of course that's a goal every year, but this year I feel like I accomplshed a lot in this area. Working on real-world projects again with the latest .NET technologies is a great way to do that. I learned BizTalk, took guerilla training at the regional MS office, passed the BizTalk 2004 certification exam, and used BizTalk in a large scale project. I greatly improved by knowledge of ASP.NET 2.0 by working on a commercial web site, and took the beta ASP.NET 2.0 certification exam (for which I am still awaiting results). I also had the opportunity to greatly improve upon my knowledge of JavaScript and SQL Server. I started learning more about WPF and of course kept up with the changes to WCF.

I also watched, with some amusement, the debates over SOA/SO. In my book, I sought to avoid anything controversial and put forward the WCF team's position on service orientation at the time. I have my own thoughts, of course, and I'll probably start sharing them this year. It certainly seems like a lot of interesting--and valuable--ideas are floating out there. Eventually there will be widespread agreement that some of these ideas are first-class principles and others are not, but we're clearly not there yet. Even Microsoft is not speaking with one voice on the subject yet. In the meantime, we're having fun debates. The important thing about SOA (sorry, but it's just a more catchy acronym than SO) is that amid the buzz and the debates and the disagreements there is something real there: a spirit of designing and constructing software that is message-based, loosely-coupled, and reusable.

Refactor Your Life

Wed, 18 May 2005 17:55:53 GMT

If you're in the software industry, you may be familiar with the term "refactoring". Refactoring involves taking a completed program and refining its design and structure to be cleaner, purer, and more maintainable. I've been a fan of refactoring before there was even a term for it: since early in my career, I noticed that after completing a project I would often feel compelled to rewrite the entire thing, because I knew I could do a better job the second time around. The exercise of creating the original version of the program was something of a discovery process, and armed with that experience significant improvements could be made.

I think refactoring is such a good idea that it shouldn't be limited to software. Right now, I and my family are in the middle of a great experiment: we're refactoring our entire lives. We are changing location and employment; We are simpliyfing our lives and tossing out things that don't matter; and we're setting the right priorities for faith, family, and work. Mind you, we've always known what the right priorities are, but somehow things can get out of whack in the hustle and bustle of daily life. We're going to see if we can change that, and we're willing to make sacrifices in order to get there.

A New Home for My Blog

Tue, 10 May 2005 19:59:13 GMT

This is the new home for my blog, which was previously hosted at http://blogs.msdn.com/davpall/default.aspx.

My previous blogs were rather infrequent and limited to technical areas related to my work at Microsoft. I'm hoping to change that now with more frequent blogging about a range of issues.