It’s that time of the year, when you’re thinking about what you’ve done and accomplished the last twelve months. I’ve been writing a summary for the last five years (2006, 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010) and I always think it’s fun to look back at the year gone and do some predictions for the upcoming one.

This year has been totally crazy - I’ve been enjoying my work and clients/projects at Connecta and I totally love that we have such a strong team and offering. I can really feel the momentum we have in our team and projects, and nothing is stopping us now…

Writing

As usual I’ve been jotting down a couple of blog posts, some better than others (IMO) and unfortunately there are several that I just haven’t had time to publish. I have on average 1.000 subscribers to my feed and a whole lot of other users finding my writings through the search engines - thank you all readers! These are the top ones for the last 12 months.

  1. Calling a WCF service using jQuery in SharePoint - the correct way
  2. Working with URLs in SharePoint 2010 JavaScripts
  3. SharePoint 2010 Ribbon Controls - Part 4 - The TextBox control
  4. SharePoint 2010 Ribbon Controls - Part 5 - The Button control
  5. Improve performance of your SharePoint 2010 applications using Windows Server AppFabric caching

Interesting to see jQuery and JavaScript posts topping the list - might give us a hint on what’s been popular this year… The post that still is #1 is the Fix the SharePoint DCOM 10016 error on Windows Server 2008 R2 (remember where you read this first :-).

SharePoint 2010 Web Parts in ActionI also finally got my book SharePoint 2010 Web Parts in Action published in April. It took over a year of writing, re-writing, testing, reviewing etc etc to get it done. And when the books finally arrived in printed form it was such a great feeling. It’s a tough competition on SharePoint books nowadays, and I’m glad to see quite good sales figures and especially great reviews (if you haven’t already - head on to Amazon and tell me what you think).

MVP again…

In April I was re-awarded the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional - SharePoint Server award. This is an award for your on- and offline community contributions. Being a part of the SharePoint MVP community is great and gives you a lot of amazing contacts with some great people.

The Master!

The MCM - Microsoft Certified Master - program was the highlight of the year! In April/May I attended the R8 rotation of the SharePoint 2010 MCM program which was three long and tiresome weeks with best-in-breed SharePoint training by the best of the best. I passed all three written exams and the qualification lab on first attempt and was allows to call my self a SharePoint 2010 MCM in the end of May. Since that rotation I’ve really felt that my SharePoint skills and confidence has improved - and I do think that also my customers feel the same. I did a post about my experiences of the MCM program a couple of months back - and if you’re interested go ahead and read it.

MCM

Conferences and travels

This year has also been filled with a lot of conferences and travelling. First of all in march all MVP’s met up in Redmond, at the Microsoft campus, for the annual MVP Summit. This was my first visit to Redmond and the summit and I met a lot of the people I’ve only met through the online world previously. I had a blast with paintball, late nights and beers talking to some really great friends. A couple of months later I went back to Redmond for the MCM - the weather was the same as in March! October and November was quite hectic with another trip over the pond to the SPC 2011, a trip to the European SharePoint Conference in Berlin and finally the Southeast Asia SharePoint Conference in Singapore. I also managed to do a couple of conferences on home turf as well.

The International SharePoint Conference 2012I’ve already planned a couple of trips for 2012 - at least two trips to US again, one is the SPC 2012 in Las Vegas where I hope to meet a lot of you. I have also planned a trip to London in late April for the International SharePoint Conference. This will be an extraordinary conference with two really cool tracks - one IT-pro and one dev, where we’ll build one big solution during three days. I promise to get back to you with more information about it as soon as it’s available.

SharePoint

Yea, as usual this year has been all about SharePoint for me. I’ve seen the product mature, I’ve learnt more about it (again) than I ever could expect and I see a huge and increasing demand for the platform. If you’re new in IT - bet on SharePoint! We’ve also seen the birth of Office 365. I’m running both my work and personal e-mail in the hosted Exchange solution and I’m very satisfied. This fall I’ve spent a lot of time with SharePoint Online trying to do real work and deployments. To put in in nice words I should say that I’m more of an on-premise guy!

Predictions

In these recap posts I’ve done some predictions for the upcoming year. I had three last year and I was right about two of them: Windows 8 is communicated and with Hyper-V support.  I’ve been thinking quite hard on what predictions to have this year, trying not to reveal anything or stating anything obvious. So here are my predictions for 2012.

  • Silverlight will die! - yeah, Microsoft haven’t put it in those words, but that’s what’s going to happen. We’ll probably see Silverlight doing it lasts breaths on the Windows Phone 7 platform though. HTML5 and JavaScript will take over.
  • Second Browser World War - for a couple of years browsers have tried to strive for a common standard, and Internet Explorer has finally caught up. Since the HTML5 standard is far from standardized we will see Firefox, Chrome, Safari and IE add its own proprietary “interpretations” of the standard which will diversify the browser world once again. It’s already happening, unfortunately…
  • Windows Phone momentum - I do think that the movement of Windows Phone 7+ will finally accelerate 2012. Great hardware, Nokia, great apps, unlimited marketing money and people getting bored of icons in a row are a few of the reasons. And I never ever had my WP7 phone crash - but for the Android devices we have in the family it’s a part of the daily routine…
  • Less cloudy - this is more of a wish than a prediction but I do hope that 2012 will be less cloudy. I’m so fed up with the term “cloud”! Of course hosted services will still be a major option but I do think that more and more customers are going to look at internal hosting and/or hybrid solutions.

What do you think?

Thank you and a happy new year

So, I do not think I will be posting anything more this year! It’s been a fantastic year but I’m sure 2012 will beat 2011 big time. Thank you all readers and followers and thank you to all new friends I’ve met throughout this year and thank you to everyone supporting me and has to put up with late night IM’s or e-mails (you know who you are!).

Now, enjoy your last days of 2011 and have really great New Years Eve - I know I will (even though enjoy incorporates some work!).