Objectives for the next six months

Well everyone is doing it, so I think I will also. I am going to quickly list my goals I wish to reach for the next six months. I think having goals that are achievable is a good thing, when you have reached that goal you can look back and feel good because you have just improved yourself.

JP Boohdoo has a good posting based around how he wrote down the objectives he wanted to achieve and how he managed to stay focused until he became successful in them. This is just techie stuff, there are a few other more personal things I also wish to achieve, but I won't list them here. Ok so this is what I plan to get myself to 2.0

1. Finish my MCSE Upgrade exams - These have been put on the back-burner for too long, I do not want to loose my certification, and it does come in very handy in my day to day job.
2. Get to grips with the latest development methodologies such as Inversion of Control, Design Patterns, Mocking, Unit testing, MVC and MVP, Dependency Injection, and Continuous Integration

Is there a specific order in which I am best to start with. I already practice unit testing, but as I have had no formal training on the subject I am not entirely sure I am getting the best out of it.

I am only investigating these topics to see what I could implement in the real world. I need to think of a good personal project I could create which will give me the freedom to experiment. I will blog about what I learn, but it may come across as too basic for some of you out there, so I appologise for that.

3. Get all my code up to a standard which will pass an FxCop analysis. I am already part way through this, but as I implement changes and refactorings to working code I am implementing better structure and variable naming.

My book list for the coming few months will be:-

Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software
Code Complete: A Practical Handbook of Software Construction
Refactoring to Patterns
Test Driven Development
The Mythical Man Month and Other Essays on Software Engineering

Well that should keep me busy.

I am not listing too much, I think it would be best achieve many small objectives than be completely overwhelmed.