My Investments of 2011 : What did I learn? Where did I invest my time?
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
- Power ISO : Create, Extract & Burn Images/Data easily
- Beyond Compare : File and Folder Compare Tool for everyone
- ImageResizer : A context menu Supported Image Resize tool for windows explorer
- Fruity Loops : Become a Music director, Play any instrument, compose music like a Pro
- ACDSee : Image Viewer
- MetroTwit : A twitter desktop Client with Metro Interface
- Video Pad : A very light weight video Editor
- Camtasia Studio : Awesome Screen Recorder for making your screen casts
- Audio Pad : A great Voice Recorder with Many Features
- Fences : A tool to group/categorize icons on desktop
- BitTorrent: A tool to downloading torrents.
- VLC Player : A cool multi-format Video/Audio Player
- FileZilla: A great ftp client I recommend to everyone.
- Internet Download Manager : Another friend for managing huge downloads
- Skype: Great Messenger. Facebook chat integrated now.
- Visual Source Safe : Source control tool!
- Winrar : Compress & Uncomress files!
1. Mozilla Firefox – My favorite browser of 2011 Award Goes to this one!
- Firebug – A debugger and Dom Viewer
- Fireshot - A screenshot utility
- Pencil Sketch – Helps you create prototypes of apps!
- AdBlockPlus – Blocks unwanted ads in websites
- Read It Later – Add-on to Bookmark the URLs and to read it later
- Another Way2SMS – A tool existed for some time to send SMS from the address bar
- ColorZilla – A color picker utility for Firefox. I love the most.
- YSlow – Page performance indicator which also suggests you on improving the performance
- Jquery & JqueryUI : JS Library for Developers
- Mootools : JS Library for Developers
- Sencha Ext Js : JS Library for Developers
- Moment.js : A small Library that helps you when dealing with date and time
- Three.js : A great 3d rendering library
- Batman.js : A framework for building rich web apps
- Popcorn.js : A HTML5 Media framework
- Modernizr.js : Detects browser support for CSS & HTML5
- Uploadify.js : A light weight Async file Uploader
- Node.js : Event driven I/0 Server side JS Environment
- KnockOut.js : Superb library for building rich web apps with clean & Responsive data model
- SignalR : Async signaling library for ASP.NET to help build real-time, multi-user interactive web applications
- OData : Web protocol for querying and updating data
- Windows Phone 7 & SDK : Great 0S & SDK for windows Phone & programming
- Entity Framework : A data access technology for new applications
- Web Activator : A Nuget package that allows other packages to execute some startup code in web apps
- Ajax Control Toolkit : Provides Rich Set of Controls
- Ajax Minifier : Helps you minify your java scripts and CSS
- Squish It: Helps you to combine many JS and CSS files and load it as one file.
- RxExtensions (Reactive)
- Parallel Extensions : A managed Concurrency Library
- HTML5 : HTML5 is a language for structuring and presenting content for the World Wide Web
- Infragistics Suite : Rich Set of Controls for Windows/Web/Silverlight Apps
- HTML Agility Pack : Agile HTML parser library that proposes a read/write DOM and supports plain XPATH or XSLT
- Caliburn : A framework designed for WPF and Silverlight which implements a variety of UI patterns
- Unity : Unity is a lightweight, extensible dependency injection container
- Dynamic Extensions : Extension snap-ins that are added to a scope or result item programmatically at run time
- Microsoft Kinect & SDK : A motion sensing input device by Microsoft with great programming library.
- LightSwitch : Self-service development tool that enables you to build business applications quickly and easily.
- RavenDB : A cool Document Database
- Microsoft Surface & SDK : Amazing SDK and a Touch & Detect Device
- MEF : A library in .NET that enables greater reuse of applications and components
- WCF : Unified programming model for rapidly building service-oriented applications.
Top Web Services I used
- Ifttt: If This Then That. Helps to create triggers that fires on a social condition. Great Service.
- Dropbox : This saved my life many times!, 2 GB space and Syncing service
- Pastie: Share code easily. Paste code, obtain a link, and send it to your friend.
- Facebook : Share your thoughts and the things you do
- Twitter : Follow them and let them follow you. Share seamlessly.
- Gmail: 30% of my online presence!
- Google: Helper for Life!
- MSDN: A reference for MS developers!
- Nuget Packages: A repository to see what developers are doing in the world.
- JSFiddle : A website, Helps you choose a js framework, write code and preview the results
- Blogger: A great Blogging Platform from Google.
- Youtube : Cool video sharing website from Google.
On top of all these
- Visual Studio 2010/2011 Preview with Nuget Add-on
- SQL Server 2005/2008 with SSRS & SSIS
- 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 :)
Happy Learning :)
