2010 has been a really good year.

In April I was awarded the Microsoft MVP Award for Client Application Development, which was a huge milestone in my career. I don’t know if I’ll ever get it again, but it at least lets me attend the MVP Global Summit in 2011 which I’m really looking forward to.

Throughout the year I’ve continued to attend (and often present at) the Albury/Wodonga .NET User Group. Attendance has been down, but we have a core group of passionate coders who are all great guys. I hope we’re able to swell the numbers somewhat next year.

I started my first open source project, Halfwit, and rewrote it in the form of Halfwit 2, whose source I will make available when TweetSharp v2 is released. Halfwit has a few users out there, but more than anything I hope it has helped someone with WPF, either by looking at the source or by reading some of the blog posts I’ve made about it.

Speaking of blog posts, I managed to get hold of http://matthamilton.net in 2010 and started a coding-oriented blog there. Mad Props is now a personal blog and you’re unlikely to see many code samples here from now on.

My development blog runs on FunnelWeb, which is an open source project that I helped kick off this year. Of course, it was open source for a while before I got involved, but Paul Stovell, Aaron Powell and I gave it its new name and new home on Google Code, and we’re seeing more and more FunnelWeb blogs pop up as “real developers” adopt it. FunnelWeb was a great way for me to get exposure to ASP.NET MVC, and I’d like to think that it serves as a reference ASP.NET MVC 3 application.

I’ve also starting working again on a WPF version of Comicster, which is really coming along nicely. My work on FunnelWeb introduced me to Mercurial as a version control system, and I’m using that (via BitBucket) for Comicster too. There’s a conceptual chasm between Subversion and Mercurial, but I think I’ve bridged it and I’m really starting to enjoy working with Hg.

While on the topic of software development: I attended both DDD Melbourne and Code Camp Oz this year. I hope to be able to get to more conferences of this kind next year – perhaps DDD Sydney and/or Remix. Fingers crossed. The conferences are a great technical resource, but more than that they’re a great way to catch up face-to-face with people I converse with every day on Twitter.

In August/September/October Sal and I travelled to the UK and Europe (via Dubai) which was my first time in a non-English-speaking part of the world. (Unless you count New Zealand. Heh.) The trip was outstanding and one I’ll look back on fondly for the rest of my life. I hope to do something like that again one day, but probably not for a few years!

2010 was something of a gadget year, with me purchasing a Zune HD from eBay, a Kindle 3 for Sal, and getting a Kinect for Christmas. I also bought a new PC which has been kick-ass as a development box and a media centre.

I think I’ve covered all the big ticket items from the year. I look forward to 2011 – I think it could be even better!