Best of 2009

It's been a little more than 6 months that I have started blogging and it's already time to look back and have a small retrospective. All in all, it's been a lot of fun putting together post after post.

I haven't got a strict publishing schedule, and I tend to prefer quality over quantity.
That being said, not all posts are created equal and inevitably some received greater attention than others. Here's a little list of the posts that have ranked higher in my stats.

Visual Studio 2008

Overall, posts related to Visual Studio tend to gather a lot of audience. The post on the shortcuts is ranking number 1 in my statistics. A sign that many developers still prefer to move around using the mouse as little as possible. And so do I.

• Most Useful Visual Studio 2008 Keyboard Shortcuts
• More Visual Studio 2008 Shortcuts: Trasposing Characters, Words and Lines
• Must have VS 2008 Free Plug-ins (1): Style Cop
• Must have VS 2008 Free Plug-ins (2): Ghost-Doc

Design By Contract

During the summer I have started investigating Microsoft's way to Design By Contract, that is Microsoft Contracts. These introductory articles have received their fair share of visitors.

• Introduction to Microsoft Code Contracts
• Code Contracts: Invariants
• Code Contracts and Inheritance

WCF

Moving files around with WCF seems to be a pretty common task, yet there have been very little posts on this topic on the net. Therefore once I managed to put together a workable solution, I shared my implementation so that others may pick it from there and adjust to taste. As expected, these two posts have become a hit.

• File Transfer with WCF
• File Transfer with WCF: Part II

Service Locator

In one of my projects I have found myself in the need of creating a tiny service locator. I didn't want to bring in our company's full fledged IoC container in this case, to keep depenencies to a minimum. This series of post describing that little implementation have been fairly succesful.

• Service Locator Pattern in C#: A Simple Example
• Service Locator Pattern in C# with Lazy Initialization
• A Singleton Service Locator Pattern

Reviews

I am currently reading many technical books at the same time. One of the best of the group has been the The Pragmatic Programmer. Despite being a recent post, this one is already ranking very high, possibly because of the recent surge of interest around the sofware craftsmanship movement.

• Book Review: The Pragmatic Programmer