What have I been doing on my sabbatical?

Since I stopped working on Feb. 29, 2008 a lot of people have asked what I have been doing so I thought I would write something up. Here is what I have been doing to keep busy.

The objectives I set were to learn more about (1) computer security, (2) Windows Vista/Server 2008 platform, (3) .NET 3.5, specifically WCF and LINQ, (4) concurrency, parallelism, and scalability, (5) agile software development, (6) software design, and (7) advanced debugging.

Books Read

• Writing Secure Code for Windows Vista
• Windows Server 2008 Security Resource Kit
• Ethical Hacking and Countermeasures 6.0, Volumes 1, 2, and 3
• Windows Vista Inside Out
• Windows Server 2008 Inside Out
• Inside SQL Server 2005: Query Tuning and Optimization
• Pro C# 2008 and the .NET 3.5 Platform (Ch. 10, 11, 14, 20)
• Silverlight 1.0 Unleashed (don't recommend)
• Essential Silverlight 2
• Learning WCF
• Essential Windows Communication Foundation (don't recommend)
• Windows Via C/C++ (Ch. 6 - 11)
• The Enterprise and Scrum (2nd time read)
• Agile Project Management with Scrum (2nd time read)
• Domain-Driven Design
• Working Effectively with Legacy Code
• Software Factories (don't recommend)
• I.M. Wright's "Hard Code" (don't recommend)
• Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering
• Programming Robotics Studio (don't recommend)

Books Currently Reading

• Programming WCF
• Pro LINQ
• Expert F#
• Applying Domain-Driven Design and Patterns
• Domain-Specific Development with Visual Studio DSL Tools
• Understanding IPv6 2nd Edition
• Windows Server 2008 TCP/IP Protocols and Services
• Advanced Windows Debugging
• The Text Mining Handbook
• Text Mining
• Beautiful Evidence

Events Attended

• MIX, March 2008
• Devscovery Conference, April 2008
• ALT.NET Seattle, April 2008
• Edward Tufte's Presenting Data and Information, May 2008
• Hacker Halted USA 2008 Conference, May/June 2008
• DC ALT.NET Meeting, Monthly

Events Planned

• Black Hat USA 2008, August 2008
• Microsoft Professional Developers Conference, October 2008

Software I have been playing with

• Microsoft Robotics Studio and Lego Mindstorm NXT
• ASP.NET AJAX
• ASP.NET MVC
• xUnit.net 1.0
• Enterprise Library 4.0, specifically Unity
• Windows Communication Foundation
• Web Service Software Factory - Modeling Edition Visual Studio 2008
• LINQ
• .NET Asynchronous Programming Model and Jeffrey Richter's Threading Tools
• Parallel Extensions to the .NET Framework
• JetBrains Resharper 4.0
• JetBrains dotTrace 3.1

Certification Exams Passed

• Certified Ethical Hacker
• Microsoft .NET Framework, Application Development Foundation (70-536)
• Windows Vista, Configuring (70-620)
• Windows Server 2008 Applications Infrastructure, Configuring (70-643)