A new year

.. a time to look forward

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Now 2009 is officially on its way and it is passed the day for sending best wishes I will give a quick update on what I am upto in the coming time.

Currently I am involved in some projects at work (both insourced and outsourced) and personally I am doing a bit of a project as well. Let me tell you some things about these.

Work projects

Normal working hours

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Working as a consultant I am since May last year working on a huge project for the Dutch Taxes. I was hired out to Getronics PinkRoccade, which was taken over by Capgemini. It's an interesting project. I think that's a nice way of putting it. My main activities are in programming parts of the Intranet site using things like C#, ASP.NET, WCF, HTML, CSS, SQL Server, SharePoint MOSS. All in a nice Team System environment on a virtual machine.

The funny thing is that my first ever job orientation I did was with Capgemini (I declined, finding it did not fit me). The first ever real job interview was at the Dutch Taxes. I completely flunked that as I had no idea what a job interview was. There were seven (!) people sitting across the table and that completely got me confused.

Other moments of the day

That project is not enough apparently and we are working on some in-house side projects. One of those is a Saas application we are devleoping. It's an online version of Microsoft team Foundation Server. Currently we are busy setting up the service. The accompanying site is getting close to full launch. The actual service is (still) in alpha testing and we expect soon to start with the first beta tests. All in all really exciting.

Coming soon

If that still does not seem enough there already running plans for a next in-house project. This is at the moment still hush-hush. But we intend to outsource some of the coding and also make use of our own Online TFS service. Can be really exciting as well.

Is there still time left?

Well, hardly any time left. But time enough to squeeze in a little project of myself. I am writing a small Silverlight application. To learn that environment, but also because I am need a tool to draw the excercises I use in my field hockey trainings. Usually I just jots some lines and arrows on piece of paper and that's it. But I want to go one step further and have something readable for others.

I have looked around the web and found some tools / sites. These are either big downloads and cost a little or a lot of money. But they all lack some of the things I want. I want to be able to share my excercises and let others use them as inspiration to create even better excercises. Very Web 2.0, very social app.

So, I am trying to set all these things up and have chosen Silverlight as the rich UI element for drawing the excercises.

Enough to keep me busy?

It seems I have a family as well and a hockey team and a dog and a cat.

Better get to work and than quick to get back again and be socially responsible.