I compiled a list of most popular posts that were published on this blog in 2011. Unlike last year, and the year before that, this year it’s not a strict top five list. While analyzing the statistics, I found out that a few topics -covered over multiple posts - were popular this year.

Preparing for my HTML5 Webcamps session on WebSockets, I wrote a few posts on the Microsoft WebSockets prototype. I published a step-by-step guide on how to get the prototype working on your machine. A little later I also published two posts covering the internals of the client and server WebSockets prototype. I’m not surprised search drove a lot of traffic to these posts. Microsoft hardly tried to make it easy to play with the prototype: no tutorials, no source, nothing. Now the specification is stable, and WCF 4.5 has WebSockets support out of the box, I suspect MS will make greater evangelizing efforts. Or maybe, they will wait until one of their browsers support it.

In this post I rambled on how liberating it can be to build something small on your own now and then, just to keep your sanity and escape from software in the real world. This post got picked up by Hacker News, making it the second entry in this list.

In one of those sporadic academic moments, I had a look at one of the quirks in anonymous type equality. I also looked at the reason why anonymous types can be compared in the first place, being reference types after all.

To wrap up this link collection, I would like to thank you for reading. I hope to see you contribute to this little outlet of mine for another year.