Best of JaysonKnight.com -- Happy New Year!

One thing that really bugs me about blogs is that it’s still really damn hard to find specific information on a blog once you find it.  Sure, we have things like post categories, and more recently blogs have appeared that support searching said blog for information…but the only true way to glean information from a blog is to read it from beginning to end, and who has time to do that? 

I’ve been blogging for 2 years now, and I’m almost at 500 posts…I certainly don’t expect new readers to start from day one and read this in its entirety (unless you’re really really bored).  So this year I decided to put together a “best of” JaysonKnight.com (well, the posts I like best at least) for your reading and/or insomnia fixing pleasure.  Here’s a list of my favorite (and most heavily Googled) posts I’ve made over the years:

• Common .Net Interview Questions.  Yes, very basic stuff, but you’d be surprised how many of these questions trip up potential hires.  Of course I would never use these questions an a surefire test, but if someone can’t answer these fundamental questions they definitely wouldn’t make it to my next round of interviewing. 
• An Open Letter to the CEO of Lindows.  Yes, I actually sent this as an email to Michael Robertson back when he was touting Lindows (now Linspire) as the Windows desktop killer du jour.  To be honest, I was actually very curious about the work they were doing on Lindows, yet I never heard back from them (imagine that).  I emphasized the capital ‘W’ as at the time MS was pursuing litigation against Linspire, which I totally agreed with.
• A Simple System for Visual Studio Projects.  This is a system I came up with a while ago to solve the issue with VS projects of “what if I need to change drive letters (i.e. a drive fails or whatnot).  I won’t rehash the post, but the steps outlined have saved my ass more than once.
• A Preview of X# (back when it was known as Xen…the precursor to LINQ).
• Honda’s Cog Commercial.  This is one of the most viewed posts on my site…unfortunately the videos linked to in the post crap out in newer versions of Quicktime (and I have no idea why).  It remains to this day one of the coolest commercials I’ve ever seen.
• ASP.NET Performance Tuning and Analysis.  Another of my most viewed posts, I still use it as a reference.
• My Solution for Checking Palindromes.  I wrote this in response to the now infamous Channel9 challenge issued a while back.  Mine was the fastest out of all the others on that thread that I tested, yet I didn’t win.  Unlike many of the other submissions, mine also handled cApItAlIzAtIon, punctuation, and whitespace correctly.  Oh well.
• A High Level Look at Resource Management in Visual Studio 2005 (and how it compares to the things were done previously).
• A High Level Article Comparing Different Mechanisms to Check a String’s Numericity.  In short, it proves what we all already know, but it was still a fun exercise nonetheless.
• Software Engineering Isn’t Computer Science.  I link to an interesting PDF explaining how building software isn’t computer science, which I still believe.
• How to Change the Number of Undo Buffers in Query Analyzer.  This drove me crazy for a while, so I figured out how to increase the number of times you can hit Ctrl-Z in Query Analyzer.
• Executing a DTS Package From Managed Code.  I still get tons of hits on this post, even though it’s (what I would think to be) pretty common knowledge at this point.
• How to Increase the Number of Concurrent Downloads in Internet Explorer.  Of course I use Firefox now, so this isn’t an issue…but I actually got paid for submitting this tip to WinNTMag.
• Simple Modal Winforms Change Password Dialog.  I wrote a short article that addresses some quirky behavior I discovered in modal Winforms dialogs, namely that ErrorProviders lock controls, and how to tap into the message loop (WndProc) to trap for clicking the X (close) button, and also a high level primer on running validation.  I’ve ended up using variants of this code in lots of projects.
• Ashlee Simpson Making an Ass Out of Herself.  Worth reading just for the comments (by far the most comments I’ve received on a post…comments came in for 6+ months).
• My Take On Magnolia (which is quite possibly one of the best movies ever made).
• Dave Navarro Answers a Question of Mine on His Site.
• How To Piss Google Off.  I’ll give you a hint…don’t violate their Terms of Service; they’ll drop you like last weeks dirty laundry.  It took me close to 6 weeks to get reindexed.
• A Random Cycling Story (it links to an even better story about a coder turned courier, a fantastic read).
• Mitch Hedburg Audio/Video Files.  If you’ve never heard Mitch’s comedy, you are really missing out.
• Where My Arse is Parked 10+ Hours a Day.  I do have a really nice (soothing) view though, and a really comfy chair.
• Some Really Cool Keyboards.
• I Love Answering My Own Questions in the Comments.  No other namespace makes me scratch my head more than System.Reflection, and IMO none are as powerful (and misunderstood).
• And finally, One of my Personal Favorites.

I’ll end it there as this post has gone on long enough, but hopefully there’s some interesting stuff above for any of the new people.  In other JK.com news, I am once again number 1 on Google for ‘Jayson Blog’, ‘Jayson Knight’ (amongst others), and I’m number 12 for just ‘Jayson’…yet my traffic continues to languish since moving to the CS platform.

Anyways, I plan on having a very low key New Years this year…last year I had a dozen or so folks over (and spent a few days recovering); this year a buddy of mine is graciously playing host to pretty much the same crowd out at his pad, most definitely will be a good time.