It’s the end of the year and it’s time for the annual year in review blog post. I know what you’re thinking, but don’t worry, you remembered to turn off the stove before leaving.

You’re also probably thinking, “do we really need an end of year blog post from everyone?”. I asked on Quora, and the answer is a definitive no, we don’t. This is my absolutely unnecessary self indulgent end of year blog post. I wouldn’t have it any other way, would you?

I didn’t want to settle with an ordinary “Ho hum bore you to tears 2010 Year in Review Blog Post”. Mainly because I hate to see you cry. Really. Please stop. What I wanted was nothing short of nuclear supernova fireworks, dancing panda bears, and double rainbow fish that shoot sparks out their butts. In short, a blow your monocle off spectacular end of year review blog post!

Unfortunately, I waited too long and everybody was booked. So all I could get was this dancing panda.

This has been a great but somewhat crazy year for me. It’s kind of insane to think that in the same year we released the RTM for ASP.NET MVC 2, we also released not one, but count ‘em, two release candidates for ASP.NET MVC 3!

Also in this year, we started a new open source package manager, NuGet, which accepts external contributions. My how the pendulum swings over here.

What I Liked In 2010

2010 presented me with a lot of things to like.

  • Podcast: In general, I feel the same way Scott Hanselman feels about Podcasts when he said “Sorry folks, PodCasting = Verbal Incontinence.  I’m just not feeling it.” This makes for delicious irony that he’s involved in my favorite podcast of 2010, This Developer’s Life. Started by friend Rob Conery, I describe it as focusing on the more human side of software and it’s pretty much the only podcast I subscribe to.
  • Video: RSA Animate – Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us. I absolutely love how this video uses a unique animation style to present on the topic of motivation.
  • Book: I didn’t read a lot of books in 2010, but one that stood out was Rocket Surgery Made Easy: The Do-It-Yourself Guide to Finding and Fixing Usability Problems, which is Steve Krug’s worthy follow-up to Don’t Make Me Think. You owe it to the users of your software to read and absorb these books.
  • Blog: Nothing really did it for me this year. As always, I enjoyed CodingHorror, but I found a read a much wider variety of blog posts due to Twitter and unfortunately didn’t remember to bookmark my favorite of the year. I’ll try better next year. Smile
  • Gadgets: This is a tie between my iPhone 4 and my Kinect. I am on my phone all the time. Perhaps too much. Ok, definitely too much. I now have a WP7 Samsung Focus at home, but I haven’t had any time to play with it yet. We recently got a Kinect and I am totally hooked on Dance Central. The part that really hooked me is that they show where your score ranks among the scores of your friends on X-Box live after each dance. I’m determined to destroy my friends with my fresh moves.
  • My Kids:Seriously, they’re cool! (I like my wife too, but she doesn’t like her picture plastered on the web. My kids get no choice.) Winking smileMe-and-the-kids

Memorable Moments/Trips of 2010

Here are some memorable moments from 2010 that I happened to blog about. I’m sure there are many others memorable moments I forgot to blog about.

  • February I visited Austin Texas for the first time. I spoke at the Austin .NET User Group as well as at Dell and enjoyed the fine taste of Rudy’s BBQ. I spent every moment reminding Texans that if Alaska were split in half to make two states, Texas would be the third largest state in the union.
  • March We released ASP.NET MVC 2 which was shortly followed with the source code release of System.Web.Mvc.dll under the Ms-PL license. I was allowed exactly two breaths of relief before getting started on ASP.NET MVC 3. In the same month, I attended the Mix 10 conference in Las Vegas and met John Resig and Douglas Crockford for the first time. I gave two talks, one of them co-presented with Scott Hanselman which is always a good time.
  • April I attempted an April Fool’s joke. I’ve been told many times I should leave comedy to the experts, but I don’t see the fun in that.
  • June The Subtext team and I released version 2.5 of Subtext. The pace of work on Subtext has really slowed down as work has kept me busier and busier, but we’re still improving it and getting closer to another release. Also in June, I took my son to Alaska to visit his grandparents as a little vacation. While there, I spoke at the Alaska .NET User Group. No moose were in attendance.
  • July We released the first preview of ASP.NET MVC 3. This was the first public disclosure of the new streamlined Razor syntax for views. Nobody was cut in the process.
  • August After a five year absence, I returned to Black Rock City for the Burning Man festival. As best as I can tell, I did not die while there.
  • SeptemberI presented at Web Camp L.A. In the evening, I visited my old friends and we went curling. Yeah, seriously.
  • October We publicly announced the NuGet package manager project (it was initially called NuPack). This was a project I had been working on at the same time as ASP.NET MVC 3. To me, this project was very significant as it’s an open source project that accepts external contributions! But don’t worry, we also reject some too.
  • December We released the second release candidate for ASP.NET MVC 3.

My Top 3 Posts (Using the Ayende Formula)

With Subtext 2.5, the Ayende Formula, as we call it, is now integrated into the Subtext admin dashboard which makes compiling this list very easy!

Interestingly enough, this list doesn’t correspond to the posts that I think are most interesting. But that’s typically the case. I have bad taste.

  • ASP.NET MVC 2 Optional URL Parameters Covers using UrlParameter.Optional for optional Routing paramreters in ASP.NET MVC 2 (36 comments, 40,542 Web views, 23,818 aggregator views).
  • Sending JSON to an ASP.NET MVC Action Method Argument This post covers posting JSON to an action method in ASP.NET MVC 2. Some of the code presented in this post is now built-in with ASP.NET MVC 3. (39 comments, 37,668 web views, 21,899 aggregator views)
  • Razor View Syntax This post gave a little bit of the backstory about the new Razor syntax our team built for ASP.NET MVC as well as a new product, ASP.NET Web Pages. (43 comments, 27640 web views, 23234 aggregator views)

My Top 3 Posts (Using the Haack Formula)

The Haack Formula just involves me arbitrarily picking my personal favorites.

Enough About Me, What about You?

Yes, I get self absorbed. But let’s set that aside a moment and talk about you (insomuch as it pertains to me Me ME!). How you doin’?

According to Google Analytics:

  • Hello Visitors! 1,308,414 of you (absolute unique visitors) made 1,972,239 visits to my blog came from 219 countries/territories. Most of you came from the United States (676,050) followed by the United Kingdom (170,814) with India (140,732) in third place.
  • Browser of choice:40.94% of you use Firefox, 29.2% use IE, and 23.07% of you use Chrome. Probably not even worth mentioning, but 3.43% of you use Safari and  2.32% of you use Opera. Opera?!
  • Operating System: Not surprisingly, 90.64% of you are on Windows. 5.11% on a Mac and 2.62% on Linux. The mobile devices are a tiny percentage, but I would imagine that’ll pick up a lot next year.
  • What you read: The blog post most visited in 2010 was written in 2009, Using jQuery Grid with ASP.NET MVC with 93,715 page views.
  • How’d you get here: As usual, most of you came here via Google search results (1,120,983), which probably means most of you aren’t reading this. Winking smile In second place, many of you came here directly (254,533) via typing the URL to this blog in an address bar (or clicking on a bookmark, etc.). StackOverflow.com had a strong showing coming in third with 85,002 visits referred.

Podcasts/Videos

This next list is more for me than for you as I was curious about the various interviews and talks I gave online. It’s the kind of list I wouldn’t expect anyone but myself and my mother to be interested in. In fact, I’m pretty sure my mother doesn’t care.

Suffice to say, there were plenty of opportunities for me to be aghast at the sound of my own voice.

Well if you’ve read this far, wow! you must really be bored on your holiday break. But seriously, if you’re a regular reader of my blog, thanks for sticking around! I think 2011 is going to be an interesting year as well and I’m looking forward to it.

Let me know if you have suggestions on how I can make my blog suck less.