Welcome back everyone, and Happy New Year! I hope this post finds everyone well and thriving in the new year. I am optimistic about the outlook for 2025.

This post serves a couple of purposes. First, I want to restart my regular posts. I’ll admit – I let my regular posts lapse mid year. No excuses really, but it was a busy time. The team I was leading was in midst of critical feature deliveries and I allowed that to distract me from contributing here. Well, this post means to rectify that and serve as a reminder that posting my thoughts here are meant to help others as well as myself. Second, it’s meant to gather my thoughts on where I want to focus my attention this year.

Consider it a New Year’s resolution of sorts.

So What’s Ahead for 2025 for Me?

I have three objectives for the year ahead. Two are learning goals and one is an action goal.

✨First up, my short term learning goal. I want to dig in and understand .NET Aspire (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/aspire/get-started/build-your-first-aspire-app?pivots=vscode) and its capabilities. I have worked with .NET since 2002 and I’ve worked in the cloud since 2012. I have long felt like applications built for the cloud have lived in two worlds: The application and it’s hosting. But we all know that the app is dependent on its hosting environment. They aren’t really separate, but the technologies were/are treated separately. It seems like Microsoft is finally recognizing that the two are inextricably intertwined. My hope is that with .NET Aspire, these two worlds collide and we can finally start to unify the two.

✨Second, and this one is a bigger picture strategic learning goal. A deeper dive of AI is long overdue. While I do use AI on a daily basis including ChatGPT, Claude, and GitHub Copilot, I have not yet incorporated AI into a working application. I want to dig in and learn the emerging patterns and practices. I’ll start by looking at Microsoft’s new AI extensions for .NET (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/ai/ai-extensions). And of course, I’ll be on the lookout for new tools and techniques to leverage AI to do interesting and useful things. One area that I have started to get curious about is agentic AI. If you don’t know what that is, an AI agent is a program that uses AI to interact with its environment to gather data, make decisions, and carry out goals that a human sets for it (https://aws.amazon.com/what-is/ai-agents/).

📌And finally, my third action-oriented goal is to build an app. It seems like the perfect way to bring my first two goals to life and do something useful with them. More importantly, it will help me to return to my roots of software development. I want to build. I want to be immersed in code again. It’s been too long. Design and coding helps to focus my attention. There’s a certain satisfaction that comes from creating something. Hopefully it solves a problem. If not, at the least, I will have learned something new.

And for those of you reading this blog, I will post my thoughts and notes along the way. Hopefully, you’ll find some nugget that will help you too. Maybe it will inspire you to something creative too.

Have a blessed day and Happy New Year. I’m looking forward to a great 2025.

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