The year 2012 in highlights!

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2012 has been an overwhelming year, I had my share of up’s and down’s. The year started on a high note with Microsoft presenting me the MVP award for Visual Studio ALM. I changed my availability status (no this doesn’t have anything to do with the MVP award) from being single to being married on 11th February – My big fat Indian Wedding. During my visit to India I met Chuck, with support from Anuthara and her team in IDC I launched an initiative to deliver a series of videos with the product team in a mix of English + Hindi ALM in Hinglish. I completed work on the community TFS Build Manager project and released the feature – Build Notes, this was well received by the community and got attention on MSDN newsletters.

Then came the lowest phase when my mother was diagnosed with a malignant cancerous brain tumour. Though my mother bravely fought the tumour and the treatment for 6 months but unfortunately we lost her on the 3rd of August 2012. You continue to live in our hearts Mom, may you rest in peace in the heavens above. It took a lot of effort to focus on work again, I then started the performance testing in the cloud project where I leveraged Visual Studio Ultimate and Windows Azure to build elastic load testing infrastructure, a talk on this subject was also presented at Kolkata geeks user group. I also presented a talk on ‘Visual Studio – A consultants armour to fighting bugs and poor performance in production’ at the occasion of Visual Studio Launch event in Microsoft India. I also presented at couple of user groups in the UK on the subject ‘IntelliTrace in Production’.

I was on boarded as an associated ALM Ranger to one of the most prestigious ALM community program run by Microsoft and independent ALM consultants, list of projects run by ALM rangers. Though I blogged about a lot of exciting problems in the ALM space, personally the highlight for me was launching the codePlex project ‘TFS Demo Setup’, using the TFS API I created a reusable program to set up TFS service project from scratch to a standard project in use for demo purposes in less than 1 minute. My blog post ‘Selling Visual Studio ALM’ was included as a guest post in the MSDN flash. I made appearance in the MVP Friday five, MSDN UK, MSDN, MSDN Video Tip, MSDN top tip and Microsoft ALM blog. I ended the year by posting a series of blog posts on the scheduling service Quartz.Net.

In the midst of ups and downs this year I delivered answers to over 800 questions on MSDN forums, 40 + blog posts, > 150 minutes of ALM video tutorial, contributions to 2 Visual Studio tooling extension projects on codePlex and unlimited hours of commitment in the Visual Studio ALM Rangers & Champs program. This year my blog excelled to 15,000+ clicks/month with around 9,500 unique visitors per month. Below is a list of the top blog posts from 2012.

Top 15 posts of 2012 in the order of popularity

I have grand plans for next year, stay tuned for more exciting stuff in 2013!

Thank you for playing a long in 2012. Wish you and your dear ones a prosperous 2013.

Best Wishes,

Tarun Arora