The end of the year is approaching and it’s time for a recap on what happened during the last 12 months. As I did in 2008 I blogged a lot about ASP.NET MVC (around 40 posts) and few about jQuery (just 6 posts), but unlike last year where the most popular posts were about jQuery, this year it’s all ASP.NET MVC. Probably that’s because the technology is more mature than it was during 2008.

The most popular posts of 2009

1. 13 ASP.NET MVC extensibility points you have to know – This post goes through all the extensibility points that are important to understand if you want to fully exploit the ASP.NET MVC framework

2. 12 ASP.NET MVC Best Practices – A list of some best practices for developing good asp.net mvc applications. This is the content of a presentation I held in October at the Gladiator Fest in Rome.

3. How to create a DropDownList with ASP.NET MVC – Building a dropdown list in ASP.NET MVC requires a different approach from what you were used with WebForms, but also differs from the other HtmlHelpers: this post explains how to use the DropDownList HtmlHelper

4. How to use Ninject with ASP.NET MVC – Ninject comes with a sister project that helps registering controllers inside Ninject’s Kernel: this post is the first of series of 5 posts that explain how to use Ninject inside ASP.NET MVC. This post was about Ninject v1. Later in the year I also wrote a post about Ninject v2.

5. How to improve the performance of ASP.NET MVC web applications – This was written in response to another post that showed how to improve the performance of ASP.NET MVC applications. My point was: caching data is the best performance optimization you can do.

Looking at the posts from 6-10 there are other 3 posts about ASP.NET MVC (my stack, how to use Ninject 2 with ASP.NET MVC and one with some suggestions for RoR developers that what to start using the MVC framework by MS), one about Lucene.net and one about jQuery and Ajax.

And what about the most popular of all time?

Since I skipped the usual blog-versary post I also want to quickly list the top 10 posts since I started blogging.

  1. How to make a Gmail-like loading indicator with ASP.NET Ajax (67376 views)
  2. How to refresh an UpdatePanel from javascript (65561 views)
  3. Ajax TreeView (40261 views)
  4. How to manage ASP.NET validation from Javascript with jQuery (33433 views)
  5. Milan l'é semper Milan (30082 views)
  6. How to add a required validator to a CheckBoxList (25876 views)
  7. Rss2BlogML: export any RSS feed to a BlogML file (20688 views)
  8. .NET Ajax Survey results (18940 views)
  9. 13 ASP.NET MVC extensibility points you have to know (16454 views)
  10. The book writing process (15064 views)

The top spots didn’t chance since last year but it’s nice to see that one post I wrote this year already made the top 10 of all time.

How 2009 was different from 2008

In 2009 I posted 110 posts, almost 40% less posts than 2008 (where I wrote 183 posts). And on the traffic side, it grew by almost 50%, going from 250k views to 370k views. Also the number of subscribers grew, going from the 1000 RSS subscribers of the end of 2008, to the almost 2400 RSS subscribers of today.

What’s going to happen in 2010?

Since I started using Twitter the types of blog posts change from what it used it be in the past years: personal and quick thoughts are now on Twitter, and only technical posts make it to the blog. And I expect next year to be the same: I’ll post more about ASP.NET MVC, more about Subtext and everything that I come across during my future projects.

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