A few days ago, Darren Rowse from ProBlogger stated a blogging challenge: The 7 Link Challenge. Basically it’s about picking 7 posts that fit into 7 different “themes”. Without further ado, here they are. Sometimes I’ll break the rule and will link to 2 posts per category, but, after all, rules are made to be broken, aren’t they?

• My first Post – I wrote my first post in October 2006. It was titled Subtext Halloween. Actually this is a post I previously posted in my Italian blog, together a few others before launching the “new” blog in the proper way.
• The post I enjoyed writing the most - “My ASP.NET MVC stack and why I chose it” – After a lot of time doing kind-of team management and maintaining of old applications, last October I finally had the chance to work a green-field application with ASP.NET MVC, jQuery, IoC and applying all the best practices I had been talking and writing for so long.
• A post which had a great discussion – “Why SketchFlow is not a mockup software” and “ASP.NET MVC brings FUN back inside web development, on .NET”. The first because it had many people I respect and the “owners” of the products being discussed commenting on the post, with great insights on the reasons behind why things are in certain way. And the second because it was nice to read different opinions on the first versions of  ASP.NET MVC, when people were still thinking the new framework was too much work compared to WebForms. Actually also the post “Do you wanna be the Picasso of programming? First learn the rules, and only after break them” had a great discussion about when and how to be strict applying the best practices for good design.
  If I take into account the number of comments only, probably the post with the most comments is “So Long Avanade, and Thanks for All the Fish”, where I announced my new job and my relocation to a new country. But they are mostly “congratulations”, so don’t qualify for a “great discussion” . Part of the reasons I don’t get 200-300 comments on posts is because I decided to auto-closing comments 2 months after a post is published. Probably I’ll change this policy in the future.
• A post  on someone else’s blog that you wish you’d written - “Think before you bind” and the follow-up “Easy And Safe Model Binding In ASP.NET MVC” by Justin Etheredge. That topic is still relevant even with the latest version of ASP.NET MVC, and the two post show that you always have to think carefully about the consequences of what happens when you use the “auto-magical” features of a framework: in this case, you could be easily hacked.
• A post with a title I am proud of - “How to make a Gmail-like loading indicator with ASP.NET Ajax” – It was still in the pre-twitter era, but I guess this is the kind of title that would get attention. And not so surprisingly, it’s my second most popular post.
• A post that you wish more people had read - “13 ASP.NET MVC extensibility points you have to know” – I think that the extensibility story is one of the best feature of ASP.NET MVC. I think this is a must read for everyone that is working with it. Go and read it NOW!
• My most helpful/visited post - “How to refresh an UpdatePanel from JavaScript” - This post written June 2007 is about something that should have been trivial, but it wasn’t. And surprisingly still generates 7-8% of my visits. Which shows 2 things: there are still a lot of people that are using UpdatePanel, and that abstractions are fine as long as you don’t need to do something they were not planned for.

I’m not going to nominate someone else to do the same, but it would be fun to see other .NET bloggers joining that “challenge”.