These are my high level requirements for the the first version:

1. Keep track of all risks on  project
2. Keep track of all issues on a project
3. Upload a Microsoft project mpp file and create timesheets for resources to fill out
4. Keep track of all resources on a project
5. Calculate all reporting metrics that required by my company
6. Keep track of all to-do lists
7. Keep track of project milestones
8. Have a beautiful interface.

Some of these requirements will be a challenge for me. Especially 3 and 8. I’m not sure whether you can interface to a mpp file and beautiful design is not my forte. I’m very much a child of the “6-six shades of gray windows GUI” age.

The primary aim is to have a small project management aid on projects which are too small to justify the use of Microsoft Project Server or tools such as Clearcase, Clearquest and Sharepoint. Usually, on small projects, Microsoft project and excel would be the tools of the trade.  But tracking history on an excel sheet is hard and capturing time on Microsoft Project when you have a small to medium size team is time consuming.

I could have web apps such as basecamp but its not easy to get the necessary permission if you work for a large corporation. Besides,  where is the fun in that?

This will be a personal project so I’m not bounding myself to any time constraints. If this year is anything like last year, I will have very little free time available so committing to a date is pointless.

Related posts

• So what happened to those 2009 goals? (2)
• Beginning Development with Silverlight 2 (1)

Looking back at those goals has also given me a chance to reflect on the past year. This time last year I was starting out on a new project as the technical stream lead for a SAP Human Capital Module (HCM) implementation project. My role on this project was the main reason why I have not been able to blog frequently and complete some of my goals. If you look back at the frequency of my posts, you will see that my last blog entry was in July 2009 which was right about the time we had our first go-live. Since then, we’ve had 3 more go-lives, each one more intense than the previous one. The project will hopefully be ending at the end of this month and I’ve got my fingers crossed that my next project will allow some time for  more frequent blog updates.

Enough of the pre-amble, here’s an update of my 2009 goals.

Goal 1: Increase touch-typing speed to 50 wpm with and accuracy of 98% or more by June 2009.

It took a little longer than expected but I’m now comfortably typing at an average of 52 wpm with an accuracy of 95% to 98% for non-technical writing. For technical writing this drops down to about 38 wpm with an accuracy of 90% to 94%, mainly due to the all those shift characters I never spent much time on. For anyone trying to improve their own touch typing speed, I highly recommend http://www.typingweb.com/. I haven’t used the site in a couple of months now, but I will be returning to brush up on the shift characters.

Goal 2:  Learn the WPF Framework by March 2009.

I had a lot of fun with this one. If you familiar with windows GUI programming the traditionally way, WPF GUI’s can be mind blowing. It’s easy to create really stunning interfaces but equally easy to create bloated and ugly ones. I’ve decided to put all that I’ve learnt to good use and create a little piece of software that will assist me in some of the more tedious activities I have to perform in my current role as technical stream lead. More on that in a later post though.

Goal 3: Learn Symbian C++ by April 2009.

This one never really got of the ground mainly due to my interest in the symbian platform falling away right around the time I got myself an iPod touch. The simplicity and ease of use of the iPod touch blew me away. Nokia have real challenge on their hands if they are to remain market leaders.  While I have no plans to replace my Nokia E71 with an Apple iPhone just yet, I can see myself seriously moving away from Nokia in 7 or 8 months time when I renew my contract. In a later post I’ll give my impressions of both platforms.

Goal 4: Improve my memory  (by learning memory mnemonics and other techniques) by September 2009.

Another goal that I lost interest in. I wasn’t really prepared for the amount of effort I would have to put in to make this a reality. I might revisit it this year though.

Goal 5: Create 2 robots, one simple and one intermediate, by December 2009

This is something I still want to achieve. I never really got around to it mainly due to amount of time I spent at work. I will definitely be revisiting it this year.

Scorecard

Looking at the above, it seems as my goal achieved rating for the year is a measly 2 out of 5. I will have to try harder this year or maybe make my goals more realistic. Lifehacker recently posted an interesting  article on goal tracking tools and http://www.joesgoals.com/ seems promising. I’m looking at using it when formulating my 2010 goals but more on that later.

Happy new year!

Related posts

• Some of my goals for 2009 and how I hope to achieve them (0)
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• Beginning Development with Silverlight 2 (1)
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Some of you might be wondering why I’m using Silverlight 2 and not 3. Simple.  I’ve been playing around with Silverlight before version 3 was released. I’ll upgrade to version 3 once a good reference book on it is released.

What is Silverlight?

Silverlight 2 is a cross-browser, cross platform browser platform that implements a subset of the .Net 3.5 framework.  It aims to deliver advanced graphics and multimedia to enable Rich Internet Applications, or RIAs, for the web. Because its .Net based, you can develop Silverlight 2 applications in any .Net language including C#, VB and IronPython. The user interface can be developed in Visual Studio 2008 or Expression Blend 2. The user interface is defined using a declarative XML user interface mark-up language called XAML. A more complete version of  XAML is used to declare the user interface in WPF applications so the learning curve for Silverlight 2 should be almost flat for developers who understand WPF.

What do you need to develop Silverlight Applications?

I use Visual Studio 2008 as my primary development environment and all that is needed to enable Silverlight development is the Silverlight Tools for Visuals Studio 2008 add-on.

This installs the following:

• Silverlight developer runtime
• Silverlight SDK
• Silverlight Tools

A full list of what you need to get started is on the silverlight.net site. The beauty of it is you can download the free version of Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 or the free Visual Web Developer and get all the tools you need to develop Silverlight applications. This, in my opinion, is what makes developing for the Microsoft platform so much more appealing than say Adobe development. Nokia has taken this further and released their entire Symbian development environment (Carbide) for free.

Examples of Silverlight Applications

There some really cool examples of Silverlight Applications out there. Here are some examples that I’ve come across.

1. Silverlight games – These are mainly Silverlight 1 games but the cool thing is that most of them have the source code available.
2. Microsoft’s Tim Sneath also has a list of Silverlight 1 and Silverlight 1.1 Applications
3. Silverlight.net has a really great gallery Silverlight 1 and Silverlight 2 applications. A lot of these come with source code and you can download and host some of them on your own site.
4. Scott Hanselman has also been collecting links to Silverlight sample applications.
5. Shawn Wildermuth has some great links on his site
6. Laurent Bugnion has a great blog on tips for Silverlight development. Laurent is also the author of the Silverlight 2 Unleashed book that I bought.

Silverlight as a competitor to Adobe Flash

Adobe flash is probably more pervasive on the web at the moment than Silverlight.  My reasons for starting in Silverlight rather flash is due to my development background. My language progression has been from C to C++ to Java and then C#. If I had started with JavaScript, I probably would prefer flash as the Actionscript language is very similar.  The biggest barrier for me is the cost of the development tools. With Silverlight, you can download Visual Studio 2008 Express Edition and Silverlight SDK for free. I have not been able to find  a free version of the flash development tools.

Related posts

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