Most Popular 2009 Posts

Date Published: 08 January 2010

If you're one of my subscribers, you're probably a software developer, or perhaps someone I know personally. You might be surprised to find that many of the most popular posts on my blog in 2009 were not particularly developer-oriented. According to Google Analytics, my blog had the following stats for 2009:

1.Codebehind Files in ASP.NET MVC Are Evil (8,320 page views) – Yes, I know it's a cheap trick to call something evil to get people's attention, but it also happens to work. And thankfully when ASP.NET MVC shipped, it did so without codebehind files included with the views, at least in part as a result of this discussion.

2.Render ASP.NET Control as HTML String(5,703 page views) – Would be nice if this were built into the ASP.NET Control as a method at some point. It's pretty trivial to implement, but obviously it's a frequent search, too (almost 20 views per day on my blog alone).

3.Cannot Connect to Windows Home Server Solution(5,371 page views) – Troubleshooting home network connection issues.

4.Keep Vista from Changing Folder View(5,135 page views) – Guess what, Vista? **This annoys the crap out of people!**Thankfully, problem solved in Windows 7, which pretty much rocks.

5.How to Install Windows 7 from a USB Flash Thumb Drive(4,759 page views) – Speaking of Windows 7, this is the best way to do an install. It's a ton faster than from a DVD. I think soon, maybe even as a prediction for 2010, we'll see large software applications like Windows 7 distributed to end users on flash media, rather than optical disc. In any event, it's not too hard to get this working once you know the basic steps.

6.Excel Named Ranges and Data Validation(4,730 page views) – I'm not an Excel power user, but I did discover this feature last year and blogged about it so I'd know how to do it next time I needed to. Apparently a lot of people are also interested in this feature.

7.Fiddler for FireFox (4,700 pageviews) – FireBug rocks, so typically it's not necessary to use Fiddler while using FireFox. And by default, it seems like Fiddler just ignores FireFox's traffic. But it's easy to get the two to play together so you can use Fiddler with FireFox, and this post has the details on what to do.

8.Binding in ASP.NET MVC (4,433 page views) – Just some answers to common questions about binding in ASP.NET MVC.

9.Principles, Patterns, and Practices of Mediocre Programming(3,658 page views) – Some anti-patterns and worst practices for software development, from a variety of contributors.

10.Show ASP.NET Page Load Time(3,742 page views) – A simple method of displaying the server-side processing time required for a page to render, along with a link to an HttpModule for doing the same.

So there you have it, the ten most popular posts for my blog in 2009, of which I'd say only about half are directly related to software development and writing code (see, I'm not just a one trick pony). Here are a few posts that I think should be getting more attention: