Over the past month, the stats of my blog have basically quadrupled and the (estimated) subscriber count went from 40 to 200. I’m obviously very happy about that. Now, 200 subscribers is peanuts compared to what many other bloggers have, but considering the fact that i have no ‘claim to fame’ whatsoever outside of my posts, and that i don’t work for a large well known company, i’d say it’s pretty good so far.

But anyways, for those of you who’ve only joined us recently, i’ve listed a couple of my favorite older posts on the right sidebar of the blog. For those of you who’re reading this through an RSS reader, here’s the list:

• Introduction to Inversion Of Control With Windsor
• The Circuit Breaker
• Adding behavior with PostSharp
• Easy Non Blocking Locking
• Adding Behavior Without Modifying Existing Code With Windsor
• Implementing A Value Object
• Storing Data In The HttpSession
• Thoughts On Code Reviews

I think those posts are pretty good, so maybe some of you will like them as well

Anyways, i’m sure i’ll have a ton of interesting stuff to post in the coming months as well. For the first time in my career, i’m in a position where i’m actually doing interesting stuff all day long, whether it’s interesting coding, thinking about interesting problems with some smart people or trying to provide some technical guidance/coaching to younger developers (don’t think i’m an old fart though, i’m only 27). The only difficulty i’m having so far is going home on time :). I expect this situation to lead to a lot of interesting posts in the future so stay tuned…

I’ve added a new page to the site, called Stuff. As the late, great George Carlin would say: it’s just “a place for my stuff”. I’m gonna use it to keep various little tools or libraries or projects that i wrote (or still have to write) and that i want to share with people in case they might find it useful.

Now don’t get your hopes up, i only have one tiny little MSBuild task in there for now, with probably a few more to come in the future as i’m now using MSBuild exclusively for building projects. But it won’t just be MSBuild stuff… it can pretty much be anything, depending on what kind of things i feel i need to write in the future.

It’ll all be open source of course, and you can find a link to the SVN repository on the page as well.

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

I kinda like my list of recommended books… it’s a very easy way to point someone to a good book or two

But simply grouping them as ‘Must Read’ and ‘Highly Recommended’ was not such a good idea, so now i’ve grouped them in the following categories:

• Writing Code / Working With Code
• Software architecture/design
• Language/Technology specific
• Software development approaches/practices/methodologies

Chech out the list and buy those books! The money you spend on them will be earned back continuously through the raises you’ll eventually get after properly using their knowledge

I used to have a list of recommended books on my site but since i hardly use that anymore, i’m moving most of the content here. You can find the list here or click on ‘Recommended Books’ in the Navigation entry on the right. I’ll keep that list updated when i have new books to recommend

Formatting code or xml for your blog can really be a pain… but not anymore, thanks to the excellent CopySourceAsHtml plugin for Visual Studio. This allows you to simply select some code, right-click and select Copy As Html. Then simply paste the result where you need to put the html… very easy, very nice.

Note to Parallels users… you need to disable the clipboard features of Parallels Tools to get it working. If you don’t you’ll get an exception everytime you try to use Copy As Html.

It’s only been a week and i’m already changing themes… The previous theme (ChaoticSoul) looked great, but it wasn’t very good for displaying code. This theme (Simpla) is not as good looking, but does increase the readability. It’s a nice theme though… nice and simple

I haven’t posted anything in a while, but recently i’ve been playing around with NHibernate which sparked my interest in playing around with .NET again. A little over a year ago i sold my windows laptop which only left me with my iMac G5. The G5 chip is a PowerPC chip which ment i couldn’t run Windows on it. No biggie, i thought. I disliked Windows anyway, and i was already using .NET at work all day so i figured i’d be fine. So at home, i switched to Java to scratch my coding itch.

Now, i think Java is a very nice language and i enjoyed writing a new IrcLeech version in it. But once i got IrcLeech working in Java, i never really found something else i wanted to do in it. So then i started playing around with Objective C and Cocoa to do some native OS X programming. And while those technologies are very cool, i didn’t really find something cool i wanted to work on.

So about 2 weeks ago, i was finally able to play with NHibernate in a little experiment at work. I like the technology so much i really want to get involved with the project, and some other projects as well. So… i ordered a new Macbook so i’ll still have OS X, but now i’ll be able to run Visual Studio in a parallels desktop session alongside my OS X session. So once the laptop arrives, i plan on getting very familiar with the inner workings of nhibernate and perhaps even contribute to the project. There are some other projects i really wanna play with as well, such as Castle’s DynamicProxy, Castle’s ActiveRecord, Ayende’s Rhino Mocks and several more. Should be a lot of interesting stuff