Best of 2008 and some reflections on blogging

I thought I would do a best of post, as many others seems to be doing it.

Most viewed posts (in order):

1. IoC Container Benchmark - Unity, Windsor, StructureMap and Spring.NET
2. NHibernate 2.0 Events and Listeners
3. JQuery and Seperation of Concerns
4. Cleanup your html with JQuery
5. Breadcrumb menu using JQuery and ASP.NET MVC
6. Url Routing Fluent Interface
7. Creating a WatiN DSL using MGrammar
8. View Model Inheritance
9. NHibernate 2.0 Statistics and a MonoRail filter

This was actually my first year of blogging. I have had ambitions to start blogging for years but just never got around to actually do it, mainly because of two reasons. First I thought that if I was going to start blogging I would need to setup a custom domain, fix hosting, install and configure some blogging software, etc. All that initial setup time was a road block to start blogging, I could just not find the time to do it because of a heavy work load and a lot of overtime. The second reason was that if I started blogging I wanted it to be a serious blog with good valuable content, and for that I felt that I needed to mature and gain some more experience.

But in retrospect I regret that I did not start sooner, during 2005-2007 I was a lead developer on a multi-tenant B2B system where I did some interesting work with url rewriting with WebForms (before there was much information about it), started using NHibernate and Castle Windsor, SAP integration logging using AOP, etc, in short I had a lot to blog about that could have been valuable and helpful to the .NET community.

I am very glad that I eventually started blogging because it has been a very fun, rewarding and learning experience. One of the reasons that I eventually started was the extremely easy setup that Google's blogger service provided where you could register a domain and start blogging in a mater of minutes. Google's blogger service has been pretty great as a way to get started, the only problem is the bad comment system and some lack of flexibility. I will probably be moving to a hosted solution where I can run and configure the blogging software myself during 2009 but right now it is not a top priority.

I want thank everyone who subscribes or reads this blog, I have been very pleasantly surprised by the amount of people who subscribe, it is very motivating to see that people find value in things I write and keeps me wanting to write more and better.

Merry Christmas & Happy New Year