I thought it would be useful to start 2009 by briefly summarising what you should expect to find on this blog over the coming months.

• Data: I will continue to spend time looking at what Microsoft and others are up to around working with data. You should expect to see plenty of posts on the ADO.NET Entity Framework (v1 and v2), SQL Data Services, a sprinkling of SQL Server 2008,  a dash of LINQ to SQL and upcoming .NET 4.0 technologies such as “Velocity”.
• Windows Azure: Windows Azure will get a good chunk of my attention.
• Parallel Programming: Multi-core is the future. Right now we all develop great single core apps. Can you spot the problem :-)
• Visual Basic 10: I am a new fan of Visual Basic .NET and VB10 looks to be a great next release. I will attempt to keep VB my main language through 2009.
• Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0: Plenty of the above is part of the .NET Framework 4.0 – but there is plenty more to be explored. One of the early candidates for me will be Workflow Foundation 4.0 as I was a big fan of the initial release – warts and all :-)

The above looks to me to be plenty big enough to keep me out of serious trouble.