The New Year Begins

Happy New Year everyone! Wow, what a difference a year makes! When I started this series a year ago it was inconceivable to me that I would wind up doing a post every day for 365 days consecutively. But here we are a year later. A lot has happened in the past year. So I thought I would touch on the big things that have impacted me this year:

I decided to take on the Visual Studio Tips and Tricks from Sara Ford. Back when we discussed it I thought it would be very easy to just redo her old tips in VS2010 and come up with some new ones along the way. I was very wrong on that score. Every single tip has been revamped in some way and, as you have seen, there are tons of new tips that were never in the original set from Sara. It has definitely been interesting given the daily pace and the injection of new or updated information in the tips body of work.

Sara and I signed a book deal and are almost finished submitting the chapters to the publisher (MS Press). We weren’t even sure a new book was a good idea at first but realized that there was so much changed information that it seemed to make sense. Sara is making sure the tips work with VS2005 and writing two chapters on Extensions. I am responsible for the rest of the book (around nine chapters) and coming up with a new format to convey the information more quickly and easily.  We are working very hard to make sure the book is worth adding to your library.

As I am sure everyone knows by now, Sara left Microsoft a few months ago. She has gone to a great new job and, I am happy to say, it has had no impact on our timeline for delivering the book. She and I have become good friends and her dedication to the community is beyond compare. I expect we will be collaborating on more great things going forward.

Another interesting thing that happened was you made this blog the number one blog among all the Evangelists in the Unites States. I knew people liked the content but really didn’t understand the true popularity until I was told about the ranking. Thanks for reading and keeping me honest as we journey together through Visual Studio.

Finally, I have come up with a plan for going forward: I am going to take it a little easier this year and just do one tip a week. I’ve decided that Tuesday is the best day to publish new tips so I’ll call it “Tip Tuesday”. In fact, later tonight, I will put out my first tip for the year and then begin my normal publishing schedule of weekly tips.

Additionally, I have decided to also branch out into videos. Once I get set up, look for me to publish a weekly video on the top tips that have been previously posted. I’m still working out a few kinks so don’t expect the videos until probably late Jan or early Feb. I will, at that time, post videos to get caught up with doing one a week for the year so the first post will be several videos then one a week from then on.

That’s pretty much it. It’s time to begin 2011 and say goodbye to 2010. I hope we all have a great year and can’t wait to see what the next year brings. Keep coding and make sure to hug your Visual Studio today! :)

Zain