Late last week I attended the Microsoft Canada MVP Open Day in Toronto. What a great time. The presentations and interactive sessions made for a very inspirational event. The great dialogue with the Microsoft people, as a well as the other like minded professionals, certainly ignited a spark in me that will surely lead to some great outputs.

Coming home on a weekend gave me the opportunity to sit back and reflect on what I had experienced.  With that I was able to re-group my thoughts and come up with a renewed enthusiasm for Microsoft technologies.  This post is a listing of the things that I am going to focus on for the next year – kinda of one year roadmap if you will (or maybe a bandwagon, whatever you want to call it).

Here is the top 5 things I am going to focus on between now and end of the first quarter of 2013…

Microsoft Visual Studio LightSwitch

My passion for LightSwitch is still there, and my focus this next year will remain all things LightSwitch.  With the information I received at the MVP Open Day event,  my interest in LightSwitch has grown from a spark into a roaring fire now. There are opportunities with LightSwitch and I am going to be a part of them.

I am really looking forward to watching how Microsoft progresses with LightSwitch. Specifically, I am closely watching the evolution of LightSwitch and how developers will be able to create solutions for the cloud (see my Azure topic below). With both Azure and Windows 8 gaining momentum, I am betting on the future of LightSwitch to include deployment options that include not only SilverLight based clients, but Windows 8 XAML like (not sure the name is for it yet, but it is XML based) , or HTML5/JavaScript based client deployments. Personally, I would prefer the later (HTML5/JavaScript), but who knows.

Azure

The “cloud” is not just a marketing ploy to catch-phrase yet another offering from technology vendors. The cloud is here, and the value proposition is tremendous. I plan to integrate most of my LightSwitch with Azure, whenever possible. I’ve already started this by taking the A Little Productivity (“ALP”) solution and ported to to Azure.

Having said what I said about LightSwitch (above), Azure definitely has  place for what I will be doing this next year. In fact, my plans include some kind of Azure certification.

Windows 8

Get ready for it. Windows 8 is coming!

What impressed me the most from the MVP Open Day event was how Microsoft is really taking the time to get Windows 8 right. From what I have seen (and been told) , I am really looking forward to Windows 8.

By the way, don’t ask me what I have been “told”. I am bound to an NDA, so don’t waste your breath asking. None the less, that doesn’t mean I can prepare information in advance, and then release it as soon as Microsoft says it is okay to do so… so be sure to subscribe to my newsletter .

Windows Phone

I just bought an Android phone, but that is not going to prevent me from getting a new Windows phone. My personal technology “roadmap” includes outputs that leverage Windows phone technologies, so I better be able to walk-the-walk with something I deliver for a Windows phone.

Metro

Let’s make this perfectly clear; Metro is a design principle, not a Microsoft specific technology (see here for a great starting point about using Metro design in your Microsoft developed applications) .  Microsoft has taken to the Metro principles in the design of applications for Windows 8  and Windows phones. So, it’s probably a good idea to learn and understand what this Metro stuff is.

One thing that I do not profess to be good at is user experience (UX) design. With that being said, I plan on gaining a better understanding UX for the applications I build. The principles of Metro are something I plan on learning this year.

Should be a fun year!

Cheers.