This Thursday will be the third anniversary of my first post to this blog. This post is going to be similar to the post I did last year in the form of a retrospective.
Positives
Most of my positive points are the same as last year. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised as these are the reasons I spend my free time working on the blog.
- Driver for learning new things
- Opportunity to use new/different technology outside of my normal work
- Helping others learn new concepts
- Helping others overcome problems
- Made my first contributions to open source
- Comments from readers letting me know posts were helpful
- No big hosting issues this year (thank you NodeHost!)
Challenges
Again most of the challenges are in line with what they were last year. I guess I should take that as a red flag and focus on solving some of my challenges instead of living with them.
- Learning new things on a deadline
- Self-applied pressure to meet my goal of a post a week (increasing my stress level)
- Not focusing on stats, shares, comment, etc.
- Picking the right things to learn
- Time requirements taking away from other projects I would like to do
Top posts of the year
I was a little surprised at the makeup of this list. I expected to have more than a single repeat from last year’s list.
- Create a .NET Standard Library for use with Full .NET Framework
- Migration from ASP.NET Core 1.0.x to 1.1
- Execute Raw SQL in Entity Framework Core (Up from #4 last year)
- Angular 2 Optional Route Parameter
- Swagger and Swashbuckle with ASP.NET Core API
- Add Git Ignore to existing Visual Studio Project
I did a series of posts looking at Identity Server 4 this year that didn’t make the above list individual, but as a total, the series was huge for me last year. If you are interested you can check out all the posts here.
Resources
There are a couple of resources that I want to point out.
ASP.NET Weekly is a weekly digest of all the best ASP.NET related news and blog post run by Jerrie Pelser. Jerrie does a lot of good work in addition to ASP.NET Weekly including a blog and a book.
ASP.NET Community Standup is straight from the team at Microsoft who is responsible for ASP.NET Core. These videos are a great way to get the scoop on what is in the works. Also, note that if you have watched in the past this show has moved from Scott Hanselman’s YouTube channel to .NET Foundation’s channel so update your subscriptions.
John Sonmez’s free blogging course is what finally pushed me over the edge to start blogging. It is a great resource to help get you moving.
NodeHost is my hosting provider. They provide super simple and cheap hosting. If you are looking for a place to host your own blog check them out. Combine them with Cloudflare and Let’s Encrypt and you are all set if you are going to WordPress route.
The next year
As usual, I am looking forward to seeing where ASP.NET Core goes next. Things like SignalR Core, HttpClientFactory, Entity Framework Core improvements are going to be great to explore.
Outside of ASP.NET Core, I am looking at putting out a very basic Xamiran app. Based how that goes you may see a few posts related to Xamiran in the next year.
If there is a topic you would like to see covered leave me a comment and I will add it to my list of things to look at.
Also published on Medium.