The Inquisitive Coder – Davy Brion's Blog

I was looking at the blog’s all-time stats and figured it might be interesting to post a listing of the 20 most popular posts so far. Unfortunately, there are only 5 or so of my personal favorite posts included

1. Career Advice For Young Developers

   This is one of my personal favorites so it was nice to see this one at the top of the list. I really think the first 2 or 3 years of a developer’s career are crucial to the rest of it, so i hope this helped a few people.

2. At This Point, I’d Prefer Java Developers Over .NET Developers

   This one caused a lot of controversy. I’ve interviewed way too many lousy .NET developers in the past couple of years, so naturally i was very impressed when i had much more positive experiences when interviewing a couple of java developers.

3. NHibernate Mapping Examples

   One of my very first posts. It’s sorta outdated because it still uses NHibernate 1.2 and certainly doesn’t cover everything. But i do think it’s still a pretty good reference for people who are getting started with NHibernate.

4. Build Your Own Data Access Layer Series

   This series was very successful and was a lot of fun for me to write as well. Some of the individual posts got better stats than some of the other posts in this list, but since they’re all part of the same series i only included this one. And every addition i’ll have to make to the data layer discussed in that series will be turned into a new post

5. Upgrading To NHibernate 2.1

   This is so typical… when we released NHibernate 2.1, we introduced a new required configuration setting. If you don’t have the required configuration setting, NHibernate throws a very detailed exception telling you what to do to fix the problem. Instead of reading the exception message and fixing the problem, most people just seem to copy/paste the exception message into their favorite search engine, click on the first link they see and then read what the blog post says instead of just reading the exception message. Unbelievable.

6. Data Access With NHibernate

   Just my implementation of a Repository base class to be used with NHibernate. I guess it got a lot of views just because it showed most of the basic things everybody will be doing with NHibernate, and should be doing with any other data layer for that matter.

7. Sending NHibernate entities over the WCF wire

   This is a post that i definitely regret writing. I am now totally against the concept of distributing entities, but when i wrote that post i didn’t think it was that horrible so i documented how to get it working. Luckily, i never actually used this in a real production system.

8. Recommended Books

   This is a page on my site instead of a post… but it’s gotten so many views that i guess it deserves to be in this list.

9. Managing your NHibernate Sessions

   My Unit Of Work implementation which sort of abstracts the NHibernate session, but still makes it fully available in Repository classes. Still using this quite happily in all of our applications

10. Tired Of Working With Big Visual Studio Solutions?

    We all know what a pain Visual Studio is with large solutions, right? This trick at least reduces the pain.

11. Genesis: Bridging The Gap Between Requirements And Code

    If you don’t know what this is about, then you definitely need to check it out!

12. Must Everything Be Virtual With NHibernate?

    I recently revisited this topic with a detailed example, but this post is the theoretical explanation of why NHibernate wants you to use virtual properties and methods in your entity classes.

13. The Request/Response Service Layer

    I got the idea from this from one of Ayende’s posts, so i can’t take credit for that. But i am very proud of the implementation and it is still working extremely well for us. I really can’t imagine going back to typical WCF services after having used this approach so successfully for over a year now. I’m actually thinking about writing an extensive series of posts on this. If you’d be interested in such a series, be sure to let me know… it might convince me to start writing it sooner rather than later

14. How To Write Testable ASP.NET WebForms

    The MVP approach we use whenever we use WebForms. Which is… well, hardly ever anymore (except for one never-ending project). Silverlight FTW!

15. Educate Developers Instead Of Protecting Them

    My rant against the typical “we need to protect developers from theirselves”-approach that i see too often in this industry.

16. What It Takes To Be A Great Technical Lead

    Once again, i don’t claim to live up to that i wrote in that post but i do think those are the qualities that a great technical lead has to have.

17. The Good, The Bad And The Ugly In The .NET World

    Some thoughts on why i think the .NET world isn’t as good as it could be.

18. Why On Earth Would A Developer Do This?

    My reaction to reading a piece of example code in a book from one of the guru’s we all love and respect.

19. Slutty Types

    This one made it up here pretty fast. I can only hope the name sticks and that i have at least introduced ONE thing to the world of software development

20. Populating Entities From Stored Procedures With NHibernate

    Sometimes, it actually makes sense to use a stored procedure here or there… so you might as well know how to get that output into an entity instance easily.