it's happening again. last time this happened was 2005, but this time it is even more complicated and i have to really think about what i do this time round.

the last time this happened it was an easy decision to make, nothing really to think about, i just focused on getting my mcp and learning everything i could about .net in general, but this time around, now that i've done what i set out to do those three years ago, i have to be more specific.

yep, it is crisis time again, and i've got to pick something else to get stuck right into.

the problem i've got this time round is the shear vastness of the things that i could do! i have an excellent .net base with which to do very well in a number of different fields i'm interested in at the moment, the issue is which one of these new technologies do i pick as my master for the next few years, until inevitably this same thing comes round again.

the way i see it at the moment i've got two rather broad directions in which i would like to go in. there are others, but these are the main two...

the first of which is my good old friend, the rich desktop application. i've been developing apps like these for years, until i got to my current place that is where i keep getting told about us not being a development shop blah blah blah...i love developing these 'proper' apps, a complete experience all self contained in a nice gift wrapped box. thing is, they are not really like that these days, and i'm in real need to brush up on the old development skillz. i know exactly what i need to be doing, and i have the books i need to read, i just need to get the time to read them. i've got an application that i've been dreaming up for years now, that will be a perfect vessel for me to sharpen my coding katana on. as i said, all i need to do is finish reading these books and get on with it. gone are the winform days, i've got to get into wpf, and gone is the traditional n-teir designs, i've got to get much more into domain driven design, and get my test driven development up to scratch too.

the second thing that i'm really thinking about is moving more into the soa and bpm space. i've just completed my first biztalk project at work, and although i was quite disappointed that it didn't really include any coding and was mainly all drag and drop, i really enjoyed the different way it made me think about the way in which i tackle problems. i did also have the opportunity to work with a very great man during this project that has made me think in a slightly different way about what i could be doing if i decided to go in this direction. and i'm really thinking about it. i've been watching loads of the pdc2008 sessions over the past week or so, and you can really see the move to services that they are pushing and its all very exciting stuff. wcf and wf could well be my next big thing. and, if that really is the direction i'll be going in, then all this will kick off when .net 4.0 lands. i'll be ready and waiting for it :)

so, what does this all mean? it means that over the next few months i really have to make some serious decisions on which direction is the one for me, as i'll be taking some time out to really brush up on the technologies that are involved in what ever direction it is that i choose to go in.

its all very exciting, but i'm still at this early stage quite unsure of what i really want. i love real development, getting stuck into a real application, one with a composite ui, with an extensible architecture, with loads of backend services exposing a reusable api...or is my future more about learning the new and very interesting wcf and wf?

i dunno just yet, i need to have a sit down with myself and have a good old chat with me.