If you've stumbled across this blog, then I welcome you. I've recently joined Horizons Consulting as a Developer. I've been a software developer for about 9 years now, having started as a VB-guy, and having the good fortune of being able to start .Net development in Jan. 2002. I now begin the journey of learning yet another technology that is fairly new to me - SharePoint.
I've got a well-rounded background in both windows and web development, so I should be well-equipped to work with SharePoint. Most recently, I've been doing web development for one of the major online brokerages, so my ASP.Net experience will serve me well. I've also developed an appreciation for agile development methodologies, so I'm eager to see how that can play in the SharePoint world. I know there are plenty of naysayers when it comes to mixing SharePoint development with agile development ideals, but I've seen enough to know that there is no reason they can't play together. Besides, in my mind, agile development is all about doing the best you can to provide the customer with the most value in the most efficient manner. I myself was a bit skeptical of SharePoint at first because I was wary of the stigma of being labeled a "SharePoint Developer" as if that meant a SharePoint developer wasn't as knowledgeable or as skilled as other more general developers. I can already say that perception is completely wrong. For one, the people I will be working with are top-notch and a large part of the reason I'm excited to be heading down this new path.
In my quest to become a better developer, I try my best to keep up with what the ALT.Net folks are discussing and I'm a big proponent of TDD and agile development methodologies. I also do my best to keep up with some of the more popular open-source applications in the .Net world and have personally used
MonoRail for web development work that I do on the side. Believe it or not, this helped me when I started reading up on WSS. Understanding how MonoRail provides its own implementation of IHttpHandler helped me to get a grasp on WSS architecture, although there's a bit more to WSS :) I view my new journey as a welcome challenge and I hope this blog will become a good example of how to incorporate good development techniques with the SharePoint platform. As I begin my quest to grok SharePoint, I plan on utilizing this blog to share what real-world experience I can, along with examples, how-to's, and screencasts. My favorite technical blogs are from the folks who continually provide code examples, real-world experiences and informative screencasts for everyone to benefit from.
Ayende has to be one of the most prolific technical bloggers out there. He is very opinionated (which I consider a good thing), but always provides good reasons and experience to back up his ideas.
David Hayden is one of my absolute favorites for providing all kinds of good information for ASP.Net development and I appreciate the numerous screencasts he's been putting out for Patterns & Practices lately.
Rick Strahl is another blogger who continually provides a wealth of information for ASP.Net developers. I especially like the fact that he will blog in detail about weird bugs and issues that he runs into on
a given day. These are the bloggers who have set the best examples for a good technical blog in my mind. So, Happy New Year to all and I look forward to getting this blog up and running with good material, that will hopefully help somebody else out down the road.