The Inquisitive Coder – Davy Brion's Blog

This is my 100th post. I started this blog on June 17th in 2007 so it took me little less than a year to reach this first milestone. To be honest, when i started i never thought i’d stay interested in maintaining a blog for so long. And i sure didn’t expect to reach 100 posts. Granted, about 20 of those posts are posts that merely link to other content, but a good 80 of them are indeed ‘original content’… not a bad ratio if i may say so myself

Anyways, it’s always good to look back when you reach a milestone (even if it is one you made up yourself), so lets have a look shall we?

These are the posts that have received the most views (ordered descending):

1. NHibernate Mapping Examples

   I remember spending a full week of vacation time working on this… i guess the work payed off because this post really brought a lot of people to this blog. I can only hope that it actually helped a few people as well

2. Visual Studio 2008 Release Date

   Wow, what a fluke. I merely thought it was an interesting link for the 3 people who were following my blog at that time. A couple weeks later it was the 3rd result in Google when you searched for ‘visual studio 2008 release date’. That was actually a bit frustrating because posts that i was actually proud of didn’t get any attention at all, while this one was getting a lot of views, but you knew the visitors would’nt stick around.

3. Multilingual Data And NHibernate

   I kinda liked this one… I think it’s a pretty nice approach but due to some unfortunate circumstances i was never able to use this in a real project. Too bad cause i really wanted to see how it would turn out.

4. Read Only Generic Dictionary

   Not much to say about this one… apparantly i’m not the only one who’d like something like this to be included in the .NET Framework

5. Integration Tests With NHibernate

   This one wasn’t bad either… I wouldn’t go with this kind of integration testing anymore, but the research and experiments that led to this post resulted in my first (and only, so far) patch to the nhibernate source code which was accepted and has been included since the 1.2.1 version. Yay

6. Creating A Sortable Bindinglist

   Meh… there’s not really a lot i can say about this one since it’s a pretty simple and short post. Apparantly a lot of people where looking for something like this though

7. Native ID Generation With NHibernate

   Apparantly, NHibernate’s native ID generator is something that leaves a few people confused.

8. Easy And Fast Sorting Of Objects

   Again, something a lot of people are looking for. I could’ve done a much better job on that post, but it is what it is. It did introduce me to Marc Brooks’ DynamicComparer which i really like a lot. It’s too bad that a lot of people will probably use LINQ’s ordering capabilities instead of this since this approach will definitely have much better performance than LINQ’s ordering capabilities.

9. ObjectDataSource And Sorting Collections

   I liked this one… it’s short yet not too short. I love using this approach

10. Sending NHibernate Entities Over The WCF Wire

    Mixed feelings about this one… The post itself wasn’t bad, but i’d never use this approach on a real project. (in case you’re wondering: nhibernate entities at the business side, flat-and-screen-based DTO’s client side)

So those are the posts that have gotten the most views so far… and none of them is among my list of personal favorites (simply ordered by date):

• Implementing A Value Object
• Introduction To Dependency Injection
• Testing Exceptions
• Introduction To IOC With Windsor
• The Circuit Breaker

Simply browsing the entire list of posts made me realize just how much i’ve learned in the past year. A lot has changed in that year as well… due to an unfortunate situation i quit working at a client i’d been working for for over 5 years. It was an awkward situation for everyone involved, but i did learn a lot from it. It’s too bad some friendships were hurt or even destroyed in the process, but then again, the mere fact that those friendships were impacted probably says a lot about how real or valuable those friendships were. Oh well, fake friends were lost, real friends were recognized and valuable lessons were learned. So for the last couple of months i’ve been working at another client, and it’s definitely nice to see what kind of things are different, and also what kind of things are the same in these large companies. And i’ve come to the conclusion that it’s just not right for me. I don’t wanna work at large companies anymore, at least not for the next few years. I’ve got about one month to go, and then i’ll get some experience in another scenario: working at a relatively small software development company. I don’t know yet what to expect, but i’m looking forward to find out. Oh, and i’m also looking forward to writing the next 100 posts obviously

For those of you who’ve been following this blog: thanks, i appreciate it