I have been slacking off in the blogging department lately, but let me fill you in on the last 3 weeks or so.

I taught a class recently in Advanced Crystal Reports XI. It was a great opportunity and a chance to see just how much I really know about Crystal Reports. It’s amazing how many questions can come up. I thought it would feel wierd on the other side of the podium, but it didn’t!

I also had the opportunity to review a paper about Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) that should be public in Q1 2007. It was small role, but it’s a start! I have installed and used VSTS for a few months now, and I do like it. There are some things that are just designed for shops bigger than mine, and so those features go unused. Team Foundation Server (TFS) is yet another great product, but there are small things that do not work directly out of the box (that should!). For instance, creating a new project has to go through the provided wizard. There is no included web service that will create a project for you. Another is time reporting. There is no out of the box time report. You have to write your own custom query to get that data. Maybe Microsoft is just a forward thinker, but my day job still wants to know how many hours a project takes.

At one of my favorite websites, LearnVisualStudio.Net, I have been almost completely absent from the forums. I had made a decision to focus my efforts for a while to concentrate more on my development and get some of my projects off of my plate. The project to write a Text To Speech application for a gentlemen in Wisconsin that had lost the ability to speak was put on hold; he was given a hardware and software package very similar to what Steven Hawking has. The project to work on a social meeting site fell through on communication problems. I was not able to stress the importance of the information I had requested and decided to step away. My last project, a website for an equipment distribution company actually has kept moving and is almost finished.

I have recently decided to become a more well rounded developer and learn something new. I wanted to get away from my comfort zone and break away from the label “Windows Developer”, so I picked up a Ruby book. I had seen some of the hype surrounding Rails and thought that I would give it a try. So far, so good. I’ll keep you posted. My first initial observations are that ASP.Net 2.0 in certain situations can be like taking an elephant gun to go squirrel hunting. I like ASP.Net for writing enterprise apps, but on smaller domains it seems like it could be overkill. It’s times like that where a scripting language becomes very handy. Maybe in the next few years, Microsoft will jump on the bandwagon with a dynamically typed scripting language and framework to compete with everyone else.

I’m also looking into a quick self-sponsored project over the holidays to move hosts from Godaddy to Dreamhost and change my blogging software from Community Server to Typo or Mephisto. Watch for the change!