Mandatory look back at 2010

(c) Bertrand Le Roy 2010Yeah, it's one of those posts, sorry.

First, the mildly depressing: the most popular post on this blog this year with 47,000 hits was a post from last year about a fix to a bug in ASP.NET. A content-less post except for that link to the KB article that people should have found by going directly to the support site in the first place.

Then, the really depressing: the second most popular post this year with 34,000 hits was a post from 2005 about how to display message boxes on a web page. I mean come on. This was kind of fun five years ago and it did solve one of the most common n00b mistakes VB programmers trying to move to the web were making. But come on, we've traveled about 4.7 billion miles around the Earth since then. Do people still do that kind of stuff? I should probably put a big red banner on top of this post.

Oh [supernatural entity of your choice]. Hand me that gun, please. Third most popular post with 24,000 hits is from 2004. It's about how to set a session variable before redirecting. That problem has been fixed a long time ago. Oh well.

Fourth most popular post. 21,000 hits. 2007. How to work around a stupid bug in ASP.NET Ajax 1.0. Fixed in ASP.NET 3.5? ASP.NET Ajax 1.0? Need I say more?

The fifth one (20,000 hits) is an old post as well but I'm kind of fond of it: it's about that photo album handler I've been organically growing for a few years. It reminds me that I need to refresh it and make a new release. Good SEO title too.

Back to insanity with the sixth one (16,000) that's about working around a bug in IE6. IE6. Please just refuse to pander to that browser any more. It's about time. Let's move on, please.

Actually, the first post from 2010 is 15th in the list. We have a trio of these actually with server-side image resizing and FluentPath.

So what happened? Well, I like the ad money, but not to the point that I'm going to write my stuff to inflate it. Actually I think if I tried I would fail miserably (I mean, I would fail worse).

What really happened this year was new stuff: Orchard, FluentPath and the stuff with the Netduino. That stuff needs time to get off the ground but my hope is that it's going to be useful in the long run and that five years from now I'll be lamenting on how well those posts are still doing.

So, no regret. 2010 was a good year.

Oh, and I was on This Developer's Life this year! Yay!

Anyways, thank you all for reading me. Please continue doing that. And happy 2011!

4 Comments

  • Lots of fun reading the top most popular blog entry ;o)

  • Happy New Year!

    Regarding IE6, it's not so easy...I do have some friends working for banks where IE6 is still the official browser...and they can't do anything about it :(

  • Instead of complaining, I think you should look at your list as an indication of what developers want to know.

    There are so many blogs (like yours) about the latest beta version of something that may never take off, that's cooking in a lab at Microsoft.

    Most .Net developers are sitting in cubicles writing business applications to update customer records. They just want to know how to prompt the user when he tries to delete a record out of a GridView.

    "Do people still do that stuff?"

    Of course they do. Don't act condescending to them, OK? And they still have to support IE 6 (which your company produced), because it's still out there causing headaches. Maybe we developers should just announce that IE 6 is "so yesterday" and stop writing code to deal with it?

  • Ah, @Andrew... Where to start? There is nothing wrong about prompting the user for confirmation. You completely, grossly misunderstood what I meant by "do people still do that kind of stuff": I was actually talking about how wrong my own solution was today. There are much better ways to prompt the user than that hack. One example is in jQuery UI, another is what Netflix is doing in their queue where they execute the action but give you a chance to undo it (thus not disrupting the user's action flow with a modal dialog). Sad that you would interpret a self-deprecatory comment as condescending.
    It's nice of you to think that I'm running Microsoft but I'm not, and I had nothing to do with IE6 but yes, I do absolutely think that developers should stop writing code to deal with it and have said so on numerous occasions, including on this blog.
    Finally, "complaining" when it ends with "no regret, 2010 was a good year"? The bitching before that is clearly tongue in cheek. Thanks for the advice to "look at [my] list as an indication of what developers want to know": that was precisely the intent of that post in case you couldn't tell. My conclusion was that well, OK, what I like to write is not precisely aligned with what people want to read but that I don't care that much and will continue to write what I want to write. If people want to read it, good, if they don't, no big deal.

Comments have been disabled for this content.