The time has come to make a summary of the past year and have a look into the future – the year of 2009. About a year ago I made a similar post with a summary and some predictions.

This year has been a fast year and I have made so much, both personally and at work. For a few months in the spring I was at home taking care of my daughters and tried not to work (which I find really hard). It was a great time and I really need that. At work I think I’ve never felt this pressure from the market, no financial crisis in sight here. It’s mainly been about SharePoint, SharePoint and SharePoint. Our team at Pdb has had some really interesting projects and we have some even more interesting in the pipe.

This year has allowed me to focus more and more on Microsoft SharePoint. I took the two development certifications on WSS and MOSS (both with maximum scores) and I plan to take the configuration tests in 2009. I have quite some time blogging about it and answering questions on the SharePoint MSDN Forums which as always is a great way to get even more experienced.

The highlight of the year was of course the PDC conference in LA. I learned a ton of stuff, met a lot of nice people at the conference and at the parties, such as the SharePoint by day, SharePint by night party.

Personal Projects

As usual I have a ton of personal projects that I have been working on. I released two of them out in the wild:

Blogging

Blogging here has been fun as usual, and I’m glad to see so much new people dropping by. I’ve had to increase my bandwidth cap three times this year. This years most popular posts are:

Most of these are popular due to internet searches. If I look at what people actually reads and links to, these are the most popular ones:

As you can see all of them are about SharePoint – one of this years hottest software products!

If I count in posts from previous years the most read one is:

Last years predictions

In the last years post I did some predictions about 2008:

  • A working version of Windows Vista with Service Pack 1 Check – Vista behaves really nice nowadays. Just waiting for Vista R2, ahem, Windows 7
  • That OOXML gets approval from the national bodies So they did and OOXML is now an ISO standard, IS29500, but the debate still continues. Microsoft has really grown during this time and I think they are now more open than ever and I really like the new Microsoft. Just take a look at the latest interoperability initiative at http://www.documentinteropinitiative.org/
  • That XPS is submitted to ISO Nope. I guess they have to ride the OOXML storm out first.
  • Getting at least a few of our customers to upgrade to Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 Yes – we have had fun
  • Having a nice parental leave You bet
  • Getting some time over so I can finish msfeedicon version 3 Nope. Did some other interesting stuff instead, such as the ChartPart.
  • Testing out the new Media Center for Vista, codename Fiji Nope. But instead I got my hands on Windows 7 during the PDC.
  • Internet Explorer 8 Yes and no, I did initially think that IE8 would be ready by now – but it’s not far away…

So what about 2009?

Guessing that Internet Explorer 8, Windows 7, Office 14 and SharePoint 14 will hit the streets is not that hard. But what else? I don’t expect any major new releases from Microsoft – but I do expect some more “open source” projects dropping out of Redmond and I do expect some major updates to the Windows Live services so they become even more “social”.

This will once again be a year of constant betas, like 2006.

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year to all of you readers out there, and thanks for subscribing to my little blog. I really appreciate all feedback that I get.