The Morning Brew

In keeping with Morning Brew tradition, the 31st December sees me putting together some statistics about the content of The Morning Brew over the past year. This year is no different, and I’ve followed the format (and statistics) from last year’s post.

Website and Feed Traffic

This year The Morning Brew has opened its doors to 236,658 visits, in what has been a very consistent year in terms of visits. This year’s only major spike occurred on the 10th March when Scott Hanselman gave The Brew a plug on Twitter. Grows this year can be considered to be steady, with the baseline number of visitors on a publication day rising by 200 visits across the year.

Once again the returning visitors and recency statistics are very encouraging with a peak around the 100 visits in the year mark, and large numbers of visitors checking the site on a daily basis.

Returning Users

Similar steady growth has been seen in RSS Subscriber figures too with this year breaking through the 6000 barrier.

The Content

This year there have been 4090 links included in The Morning Brew, spread across our three standard headings of Software, Information and Community and the special feature categories used for major events with lots of posts. This year these included:

• DDD8
• Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Release Candidate
• IE9
• OData
• Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Release
• ASP.NET MVC3 Preview
• ASP.NET Security Vulnerability
• Windows Phone 7 Release
• C#5 Async CTP and PDC2010

Once again, the Information category leads the way with the number of links, with software seeing a small increase on last year, however the community section has almost doubled in number of links, mostly down to my connecting with more of the UK .NET community.

Once again, the Morning Brew has been pulled together from over 500 RSS feeds, some of which being ‘firehose’ feeds from aggregate and search sites. This has resulted in around 100,000 RSS items which have been reviewed for inclusion, along with links mentioned on Twitter and suggestions from readers.

Blogs vs Number of Links

Similarity to last year continues in the number of blogs linked to with over 550 distinct blogging sites being included and 1200 distinct blogs being linked to. As usual the long tail effect has been in effect with the vast majority of blogs having only 1 or 2 links. The Big .NET blogging sites once again featured heavily with this year’s top 10 being:

1. blogs.MSDN.com – 930 Links
2. weblogs.asp.net – 365 Links
3. GeeksWithBlogs.NET – 167 Links
4. Los Techies – 136 Links
5. CodeBetter – 128 Links
6. Devlicio.us – 91 Links
7. MSMVPs.com – 48 Links
8. Elegant Code – 43 Links
9. blogs.microsoft.co.il – 37 Links
10. Simple Talk – 28Links

The Individual Blogger chart for this year looks like this:

1. Oren Eini AKA Ayende – 99 Links
2. Greg Duncan – 90 Links
3. Scott Guthrie – 84 Links
4. Eric Lippert – 69 Links
5. Mike Hadlow – 61 Links
6. Scott Hanselman – 59 Links
7. Phil Haack – 57 Links
8. Gunnar Piepman – 46 Links
9. Rob Ashton – 45 Links
10. Matthew Podwysocki – 44 Links
11. Internet Explorer – 42 Links
12. Derick Bailey – 40 Links
13. Jimmy Bogard – 40 Links
14. Eric Nelson – 35 Links
15. Jon Skeet – 34 Links
16. Davy Brion – 34 Links
17. Jon Sonmez – 30 Links
18. Miguel de Icaza – 27 Links
19. Mike Taulty – 27 Links
20. Mark Needham – 27 Links

Attempting to work out a pattern for the type of topics that have been included in this year’s posts reveals Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 joining ASP.NET MVC and C# as major topics on the blog.

Number of links per Post

The average number of links per post has remained roughly constant throughout the year, with an average of 16 links per post. Notable high link days were 9th August (Morning Brew #660) which featured the discussions of the future of the Iron* projects along with a healthy software section, 1st June (Morning Brew #611) a large post Public Holiday edition, and 6th April (Morning Brew #573 the bumper post Easter edition.

The Final Word

The key word to describe this year has been consistency – The Morning Brew readership has continued to grow steadily, and I’ve managed to keep up the publishing schedule of the previous years. On a personal level this year has been a good one – recieving an ASP.NET MVP award in April (announced in Morning Brew #573) and undertaking the delivery of my first major conference session at DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper Southwest being the highlights.

All that remains is to wish you all thanks for your continued readership, and to wish you a happy and healthy new Year.

Other 2010/2011 Wrap up and forecast posts:

• Michael Crump
• Phil Haack
• J.D Meier
• Andrew Stopford
• Gill Cleeren

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Software

• Fibre Async Library 1.1 Released – Jake Ginnivan shares the 1.1 release of his helper library for working with async tasks on the Windows Phone 7, Silverlight and .NET in general. This library provides a rich fluent interface for chaining and batching Async tasks.
• Happy New Year, and across the board profiler discount – Ayende celebrates the turning of the year with a time limited 35% discount across his array of profiler products covering NHibernate, Entity Framework, Linq to SQL, LLBLGen and Hibernate.
• StyleCop Compliant Visual Studio 2010 Code Snippets January 2011 Release – Doug Holland highlights the release of the January 2011 version of the Visual Studio 2010 Code Snippets library which brings StyleCop compliant versions of the standard Visual Studio snippets, and adds a number of additional snippets to the IDE too.

Information

• Reimplementing LINQ to Objects: Part 13 – Aggregate, Part 14 – Distinct, Part 15 – Union, Part 16 – Intersect (and build fiddling) & Part 17 – Except – Jon Skeet continues with his series on rebuilding Linq to SQL with looking at 5 more of the core operators (Agregate, Except, Union, Distinct, and Intersect), in each case discussing the operator, defining test cases and sharing a re-implementation. Part 16 also discusses some changes to the solution structure of the supporting code download.
• Windows Azure Storage Architecture Overview – Brad Calder discusses the three layer architecture of the Windows Azure Storage System, discussing each of the three layers (Front End, Partition and Distributed Replicated File System) and exploring the lifecycle of a storage request.
• Essential Resources for Getting Started with Windows Azure – John Bristowe and Cory Fowler share a fantastic set of resources covering all aspects of the Azure platform and development, across the mediums of Twitter, Books, Virtual Labs and Tutorials, Blogs and Events.
• Testing REST services with JavaScript – Alexander Beletsky explores the testing of REST based web services from a JavaScript testing client, using jQuery and qUnit sharing some tests of a real service allowing you to see the solution proposed in operation. Alexander also briefly discusses the different ways of running and debugging the tests.
• Rebuilding the PDC 2010 Silverlight Application (Part 6) – Mike Taulty continues his series on building his PDC Session downloader Silverlight application, exploring the implementation of storing the sessions to download and looking at the performing the actual download operation.
• Performance-related features in F# and C# – ‘Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd’ discuss the 4 major factors which affect a difference in performance between C# and F# despite them both being implemented on the .NET Runtime and being compiled down into Intermediate Language.

Community

• DDD9 – 29th Jan 2011 – Conference Schedule – The Community have spoken, the votes have been counted and now the DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper team can announce the finalised agenda for this January’s DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper 9 event – and it looks to be a cracking one once again. The next significant date is the 4th January 2011 at 13:37 when the registrations for the event open.

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Information

• Foundations of Programming 2 – Chapter 2 – Yet Another IoC Introduction – Karl Seguin continues with the publication of the draft of the second edition of his Foundations of Programming e-book with a chapter on inversion of control. Karl is looking for feedback on these chapters before they make it into the final e-book.
• ASP.NET MVC 3: Layouts and Sections with Razor – Scott Guthrie continues his series of posts on ASP.NET MVC 3’s new features with a post looking at using the Layout and Section functionality of the latest edition of the Razor view engine included in ASP.NET MVC 3, taking a step by step look at utilising it.
• Reimplementing LINQ to Objects: Part 11 – First/Single/Last and the …OrDefault versions & Part 12 – DefaultIfEmpty – Jon Skeet continues with another two parts in his reconstruction of LINQ to Objects with a look at the First / Last and similar operators and exploring DefaultIfEmpty functionality, addressing each with a look at the desired functionality, a test case for the functionality and his new implementation.
• Log4net Tutorial – Tim Corey gives a nice brief introduction to the configuration of the Log4Net Logging library in this CodeProject article, exploring the basic configuration and looking at some of the more commonly used appenders.
• To ref or not to ref – Arun Mahendrakar discusses the use of the ref keyword when working with passing objects, discussing how it is different to passing normal references to object instances and illustrating the subtleties of this with examples.
• Possible issue where .NET Framework 4 setup reports success but fails to update mscoree.dll behind the scenes – Aaron Stebner highlights an issue that can occur with the installation of .NET 4 on Vista, Windows 7, and Windows Server 2008 which results in you being unable to run .NET applications due to problems with the update to mscoree.dll
• Commented Code == Technical Debt – Rod Paddock reminds us of the importance of removing commented out code and how discovering commented out code in a method causes comprehension issues with the code.
• Using Sterling in Windows Phone 7 Applications – Jeremy Likness takes a look at the use of his Sterling object oriented database for Windows Phone and Silverlight, discussing the design principles and aims of the project and working through a simple example of creating an application using Sterling working from first principles.
• Guide.BeginShowMessageBox wrapper – Daniel Moth shares a wrapper around the Guide.BeginShowMessageBox functionality from the XNA Tool kit allowing it to easily be used from Silverlight Phone applications, and provides enhanced functionality over the standard Silverlight Phone message box implementation.
• Namespacing in JavaScript – Angus Croll shares a great insight into the various namespacing techniques in JavaScript.

Community

• C# 5 – Async/Await – NxtGenUG Manchester welcome Jon Skeet to their Daresbury venue for a talk on the C#5 Aysnc / Await functionality currently in preview, exploring how the compiler deals with its use under the hood. The talk is being held on the evening of Wednesday 16th February 2011

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