Keeping Up With the Programmers

Keeping up with the Joneses, By Pop Momand, 1920. Modified By R.Claypool, 2009.

Staying current in the world of .Net is an enormous task. Framework version 1 (polished in 1.1) introduced the CLR, C#, VB.Net and ASP.Net.   Version 2.0 brought generics, partial classes, anonymous methods, themes, skins, webparts and master pages.  Version 3.0 added WPF, WCF, WF and CardSpace.  Version 3.5 added LINQ, XML literals, lambda expressions, type inference, anonymous types, extension methods, automatic properties and object initializers.

During this time, we have also had 2 major releases of SQL Server, Silverlight 1.0, Silverlight 2 and several versions of Visual Studio:

If that is not enough, notice that this pace of change is not slowing down!
In fact, the next 12 months will bring more changes to .Net programming than ever before:

• C# 4.0 is adding covariance and contravariance, dynamic typing and optional named parameters.
• F# is becoming a first class language.
• Framework 4.0 will get another batch of updates and extensions.
• Silverlight 3 will have enough new features to surpass Adobe Flash (IMO).
• ASP.Net MVC + jQuery will provide a much needed alternative to ASP.Net WebForms.
• Windows Asure will bring cloud computing to .Net.

Tortoise and the Hare, used with permission by CarbonNYC

I’ve only listed a portion of the updates that are coming in 2009, so how can we possibly keep up with this constant stream change? Any small handful of these items could easily take months to learn and years to grok, so it is important to plan out the time to learn them and have some kind of reasoning behind our priorities.

The best approach I have found is described by Mr. Jeff Atwood as a just in time system:

I take a “Just In Time” attitude to learning new technology. I can’t possibly learn everything. But I do try to learn enough to know what the new thing is, and when I might need it.

“I don’t worry about keeping up with the Joneses; I focus on the specific problem at hand. I take a “Just In Time” attitude to learning new technology. I can’t possibly learn everything. But I do try to learn enough to know what the new thing is, and when I might need it. Most of the time, I don’t need it. And when I do, I can learn it Just In Time to help me solve the current problem I’m working on.”

There are a ton of things I’d like to learn this year, but only a few that I will have time to learn. Design Patterns, Silverlight, WCF, jQuery, and unit testing (probably Moq + NUnit) are my focus for 2009. I’d love to learn F# and ASP.Net MVC, but I doubt I’ll have the time. I also doubt that Asure, Entity Framework, Prism, MEF, Pex, or many of the other dozens of projects out there will get any of my attention this year — even though they all look like useful and interesting technologies. There is only so much that one can fit into a year!