Every year I try to set a few goals around software development that help push my skill set up to the next level. In 2016 it was MVC and ASP.Net Core, which didn’t 
work out for me because when I started my journey down that path ASP.Net core wasn’t fully baked nor was the tooling completely ready for prime time.
I purchased two separate books to learn ASP.Net Core and both were early release books so I expected there would be some changes, debugging and tweaking that would need to be done to get the sample code working. However I ended up spending all my time trying to get the project up and running like the one in the book. So much so that I decided to abandon it for now and just wait for Microsoft to finish with the tooling before I tried again.
The other thing I decided to work on in 2016 was the Windows 10 Universal Platform, which I have had much better success with. I am feeling pretty good about the environment now and have just added MVVM to my skill set. Should the platform ever take off I feel like I will be well prepared to take advantage of it.
So for 2017 I have decided to build on the Universal Windows Application knowledge and delve into the Xamarin platform. Although I will be limited to Microsoft and Android because, for now, I do not have any Mac devices, which is a requirement for building applications on the IOS platform.
Next and something I have never considered before is game development. Well, at least, I am committing to leaning how to use the Unity 3d tools for game development. At this point in my career I don’t expect that I will ever actually build and release an original game to any marketplace. I can, however, see building training tools with Unity to use in corporate environments that run on the desktop and possibly in 3d.
So that covers 2017 and I can’t wait to see what this year will bring for 2018!
