My Investments of 2011 : What did I learn? Where did I invest my time?

First of all, I wish you a happy and prosperous new year 2012. Have a great year ahead. Start planning for learning!

The Year 2011 was a fantastic and a busy year for me. I spent most of my time in the tech stuff and very less time for family and friends. It's very sad but was very important & Unfortunate for me to be in the tech race. Tools & Technologies changed rapidly and always I had to keep an eye on them to avoid missing the tech train!

First day of 2012 I wanted to write something good. This post is all about the tools I used, technologies i learnt in the year 2011. These are my biggest investments of 2011 and I hope these investments would yield great results for many more days to come.

So, where did I spend my time this year?, Using which tools, learning which technologies?, Have a look at the below list. My fav's and major interests are what I have mentioned. Many Many Frameworks are not listed here which you might think are great to invest upon. I might have used them but not much in 2011. You can comment and let me know what you learnt too :)

Tools I Used the Most
  1. Power ISO : Create, Extract & Burn Images/Data easily
  2. Beyond Compare  : File and Folder Compare Tool for everyone
  3. ImageResizer : A context menu Supported Image Resize tool for windows explorer
  4. Fruity Loops : Become a Music director, Play any instrument, compose music like a Pro
  5. ACDSee : Image Viewer
  6. MetroTwit : A twitter desktop Client with Metro Interface
  7. Video Pad : A very light weight video Editor
  8. Camtasia Studio : Awesome Screen Recorder for making your screen casts
  9. Audio Pad : A great Voice Recorder with Many Features
  10. Fences : A tool to group/categorize icons on desktop
  11. BitTorrent: A tool to downloading torrents.
  12. VLC Player : A cool multi-format Video/Audio Player
  13. FileZilla: A great ftp client I recommend to everyone.
  14. Internet Download Manager : Another friend for managing huge downloads
  15. Skype: Great Messenger. Facebook chat integrated now.
  16. Visual Source Safe : Source control tool!
  17. Winrar : Compress & Uncomress files!
Browser & Addons I liked the most

1.       Mozilla Firefox – My favorite browser of 2011 Award Goes to this one!
  1. Firebug – A debugger and Dom Viewer
  2. Fireshot  - A screenshot utility
  3. Pencil Sketch – Helps you create prototypes of apps!
  4. AdBlockPlus – Blocks unwanted ads in websites
  5. Read It Later – Add-on to Bookmark the URLs and to read it later
  6. Another Way2SMS – A tool existed for some time to send SMS from the address bar
  7. ColorZilla – A color picker utility for Firefox. I love the most.
  8. YSlow – Page performance indicator which also suggests you on improving the performance
 JavaScript Frameworks & Extensions I learnt
  1. Jquery & JqueryUI : JS Library for Developers
  2. Mootools : JS Library for Developers
  3. Sencha Ext Js : JS Library for Developers
  4. Moment.js : A small Library that helps you when dealing with date and time
  5. Three.js : A great 3d rendering library
  6. Batman.js : A framework for building rich web apps
  7. Popcorn.js : A HTML5 Media framework
  8. Modernizr.js : Detects browser support for CSS & HTML5
  9. Uploadify.js : A light weight Async file Uploader
  10. Node.js : Event driven I/0 Server side JS Environment
  11. KnockOut.js : Superb library for building rich web apps with clean & Responsive data model
 Technologies and Frameworks that stole my time!


  1. SignalR : Async signaling library for ASP.NET to help build real-time, multi-user interactive web applications
  2. OData : Web protocol for querying and updating data
  3. Windows Phone 7 & SDK :  Great 0S & SDK for windows Phone & programming
  4. Entity Framework : A data access technology for new applications
  5. Web Activator : A Nuget package that allows other packages to execute some startup code in web apps
  6. Ajax Control Toolkit : Provides Rich Set of Controls
  7. Ajax Minifier : Helps you minify your java scripts and CSS
  8. Squish It:  Helps you to combine many JS and CSS files and load it as one file.
  9. RxExtensions (Reactive)
  10. Parallel Extensions : A managed Concurrency Library
  11. HTML5 : HTML5 is a language for structuring and presenting content for the World Wide Web
  12. Infragistics Suite : Rich Set of Controls for Windows/Web/Silverlight Apps
  13. HTML Agility Pack : Agile HTML parser library that proposes a read/write DOM and supports plain XPATH or XSLT
  14. Caliburn : A framework designed for WPF and Silverlight which implements a variety of UI patterns
  15. Unity : Unity is a lightweight, extensible dependency injection container
  16. Dynamic Extensions : Extension snap-ins that are added to a scope or result item programmatically at run time
  17. Microsoft Kinect & SDK : A motion sensing input device by Microsoft with great programming library.
  18. LightSwitch : Self-service development tool that enables you to build business applications quickly and easily.
  19. RavenDB : A cool Document Database
  20. Microsoft Surface & SDK : Amazing SDK and a Touch & Detect Device
  21. MEF : A library in .NET that enables greater reuse of applications and components
  22. WCF : Unified programming model for rapidly building service-oriented applications.
Top Web Services I used
  1. Ifttt: If This Then That. Helps to create triggers that fires on a social condition. Great Service.
  2. Dropbox : This saved my life many times!, 2 GB space and Syncing service
  3. Pastie: Share code easily. Paste code, obtain a link, and send it to your friend.
  4. Facebook : Share your thoughts and the things you do
  5. Twitter : Follow them and let them follow you. Share seamlessly.
  6. Gmail: 30% of my online presence!
  7. Google: Helper for Life!
  8. MSDN: A reference for MS developers!
  9. Nuget Packages: A repository to see what developers are doing in the world.
  10. JSFiddle : A website, Helps you choose a js framework, write code and preview the results
  11. Blogger: A great Blogging Platform from Google.
  12. Youtube : Cool video sharing website from Google.

On top of all these
  1. Visual Studio 2010/2011 Preview with Nuget Add-on
  2. SQL Server 2005/2008 with SSRS & SSIS
  3. Windows 7 & Windows 8 Preview
 In one more post, I will publish a huge list of bookmarks which you can consider visiting to read great articles on various tools and technologies. Yes. I read all of them last year :). All from borland C to IOS 5!.

Happy Learning :)


 


 

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