The title of this post might sound a bit scenic, but 2014 indeed has been a year of goodbys for me - at least regarding software development. As almost every leave also is a fresh start, lots of things have changed.

So lets say farewell to...

... .NET only software development

While contributing to "Pro ASP.NET Web API", doing talks and projects on ASP.NET Web API in 2012 and 2013 by persuasion, 2014 has become the year where I decided to gain broader knowledge by practice in the non-Microsoft space.

This means digging into Linux, Node.js and MongoDb and all that things like Gulp, Yeoman, Docker and ...you name it.

I also nosed around Scala, Go and Erlang, but in the end, I stick with Node.js and it's friends.

Things that felt bumpy (especcially because of Windows, e.g. CMD vs bash, Docker vs. ...?) in the .NET world, worked like a charm on the new stack and allowed me to purge my whole software development and deployment process.

Also the huge open source momentum in the Node.js ecosystem deeply impressed me.

On the other hand, in 2014, the .NET stack also has moved forward and Node.js not always is the promised land. The biggest gain for ages has been open sourcing the .NET framework and making it a real cross platform development environment.

As a .NET developer since the early days, I surely won't leave the .NET ecosystem in the near future, but there may be requirements where I or my customers will prefer the Node.js environment in the future.

... blog.alexonasp.net

When you're reading these lines, my old blog "Alex on ASP.NET" which has been around since 2003, is gone. As aforementioned, I'm no longer developing solely in the .NET space and thus my blog needs to be as open as I am.

... BlogEngine.NET

"Alex on ASP.NET" in it's early days has been running on "dasBlog" which has been replaced by SubText later on. Since 2006 it has been running on BlogEngine.NET.

As blog posts after being published, almost never are modified, running a database backed blog engine doesn't make sence to me any longer.

Because of this, I migrated my old blog to Wintersmith, a static site generator based on Node.js. It is now hosted on the DigitalOcean cloud platform and deployment is done using git.

I'll cover this in a upcoming post for everyone who's interested in that topic.