After a relaxing Christmas holiday with my family in Lakselv I'm now back at the Capgemini office in Trondheim. The project I worked on at Schlumberger shipped 20. December, on time and with more use cases implemented than original planned. Most of the project details are NDA'ed so I can't go into details on project. Since I'm leaving for Australia (with a 16 day stop in Thailand on the way) in just 8 days I'm not assigned on a new project in Trondheim. I'll use the last few days before we leave to catch up with mail, blogging, and other items on my TODO-list….

I figured I’d start 2008 by looking back at some of the "highlights" of 2007. I’ve clicked through my blog and picked out some of the memorable events and blog posts.

January
I kicked off the year by spending two full weeks at Microsoft in Reading, UK. After achieving third place in the Imagine Cup World Finals we where invited to Reading by Microsoft and British Telecom to something called the Imagine Cup Accelerator Program. The two weeks was a blast! Click to read items tagged with "Accelerator Program".

February
After I got back from Reading (just out side London) I just had time to re-pack my suite case before Hege and I flew back to London for the "Designertopia" conference (1. and 2. February). This was a great event focusing on designer-developer collaboration, richer user experiences and design.

2007 sure started out busy. After getting back from London I just had three days to get my IIS 7 presentation ready for MSDN Live Oslo, Bergen, Stavanger and Trondheim. Few people knew that IIS 7 shipped with Vista, and it was great fun to show some of the new development capabilities in IIS 7 to fellow developers around the country. The feedback was great and the conference room in Oslo was packed with about 600 attendees!

March
After a hectic start of 2007 March was a bit more relaxed. I spent the month focusing on work, university and programming. I spent munch of the month writing a library around the Ung1881 free SMS service. The Vista Sidebar Gadget using the library was well received, and now have more than 14 800 downloads!

Another important event in March was that I signed with Capgemini (even though I didn’t start working until August).

April
Another month of work, code and university. Completed my first XNA game, a PONG clone that runs on the 360 and PC, with support for the Wii remote (motion). Wrote a few "decent" programming posts, links included below:

• XPong – My first XNA endeavor
• Use Flickr as a mobile blog, merge feeds using Yahoo Pipes and import it all into Facebook!
• Super Mario Pong (Pong clone for the STK1000 micro controller dev kit)
• Free SMS Gadget for Vista using .NET Interop!

May
Attended "Developer Summit 2007" in Stockholm and got stoked about dynamic programming. Super busy month at university with lots of assignments and final exams coming up. Explored the SMS features in Outlook 2007 and wrote a "Outlook 2007 Mobile Service" using the Ung1881 Free SMS library to send free text messages from Outlook.

• Learn the language, live the lifestyle (comments on dynamic programming)
• Free SMS from Outlook using Outlook 2007 Mobile Services

June
Explored how to implement JavaScript statement completion for the Vista Sidebar Object Model in Visual Studio 2008 by creating a "stubbed" out JavaScript library with the same public interface as the Vista Sidebar Object Model. Wrote a few posts on reflection, performance and exception handling.

Had my final university exams this month and graduated with a bachelors degree in informatics form the Norwegian University of Technology and Science. Traveled to Kitchbuel with Abeo (my old employer).

• JavaScript IntelliSense for the Vista Sidebar Object Model
• How to achieve lightning fast reflection in .NET
• What you need to know about re-throwing exceptions
• Play with reflection and you might get burned

July
Best summer holiday ever. Traveled to Egypt with Hege and took the PADI Open Water Diving Certificate. Watched Metallica play in Oslo. Spent two weeks fishing in Lakselv. Spent a week fishing in Steigen. Barely touched the computer for more than a month.

• Sharm el Sheikh, diving, fly fishing and sign of life 

August
After a month off it was great to get back to the computer.  Wrote a few (hopefully) interesting posts and ended the month by presenting Visual Studio 2008, C# 3.0 and LINQ at MSDN Live in Oslo. Again, lots of people showed up and the feedback was just amazing (I was lucky with the topics I guess).

• Integrating Virtual Earth with Outlook 2007
• Using protocol handlers as a ultra thin layer of integration
• Gadgets as a front end to a service oriented architecture
• First week at Capgemini 

September
More MSDN Live presentations (Stavanger, Bergen and Oslo). Learned how to unit test asynchronous code using anonymous methods and the ManualResetEvent object.

• Unit testing event-based asynchronous code 

October
This month was all about work. Most of core pieces of the Schlumberger project was stacking up, so got tons of features/use cases implemented this month. Traveled to Kiel with my family celebrating my moms 50th birthday.

November
Traveled to Barcelona for TechEd Developers 2007. Spent the weekend before the conference enjoying the city with Hege. Answered questions about IIS 7 at the "Ask the Experts" both during the conference. Great fun with new and old friends in the developer community.

Talked about how .NET 3.5 and VS 2008 can help you implement typical Web 2.0 scenarios. 420 people showed up to check out my sample application Divebook and learn about LINQ, VS 2008, Ajax, Silverlight and more.

Moved out from our apartment in Trondheim (it’s incredible how much stash you collect over four year).

My Free SMS Gadget placed second in the Norwegian Gadget competition.

December
Lived on the couch at Espen and Svein Eriks place with my life packed in a suit case. Focused entirely on work and shipping the Schlumberger project I’ve been working on since September. We shipped on December 20th, on time and with more use-cases implemented than original planned. 0 known bugs.