C# Advent 2022 Awards
It's the second annual C# Advent 2022 awards! Every year, you all put out such great stuff. Every post is the best!
But, I wanted to do something to recognize the best of the best: the standouts from the latest Advent that have performed above and beyond, and give everyone a chance to revist them and give the Advent one last "hurrah".
Some of these rewards are based on stats like Google Analytics and Reddit upvotes. Some of them are completely arbitrary. I hope you enjoy!
☝ Most Reddit Upvotes
I make sure all of the articles are submitted to /r/csharp and /r/dotnet (with permission of the respective admins). Here are the posts that got the most (combined) upvotes (as of January 5th, 2022):
1. How To Structure Your .NET Solutions by James Hickey - pulled in over 160 upvotes
2. Building Windows Services in .NET 7 by Kevin Griffin - with over 90 upvotes, I'd say there's life left in Windows development
3. Validating .NET Configuration by Chris Ayers - a cool, unique topic gets over 50 upvotes
🖱 Most Clicks from the C# Advent Site
I use Google Analytics on the site. This award pretty much went to the first three participants this time around. Here are the posts that have been most clicked on from the site.
1. Hello from the GitHub Actions: Core .NET SDK by David Pine
2. Web Scraping and Generating PDFs Using C# and .NET by Christopher C. Johnson
3. Validating .NET Configuration by Chris Ayers
🤓 Matt's Favorite
Every post is great and appreciated, but these in particular stuck out to me as especially interesting, fun, and/or useful. Got favorites of your own? Leave a comment below, tweet #csadvent, and write your own C# Advent Awards blog post (and tell me about it, so I can tweet it and link to it)!
1. Generating C# bindings for native libraries by using ChatGPT - ChatGPT is all the rage, but I think this post shows that ChatGPT can be a very efficient and incredibly useful code generation tool.
2. Colorful ASCII Christmas Tree in C# by ChatGPT - This is a much sillier use of ChatGPT, but I love it because of its silliness AND because of how well it ties into Advent in general. AND it is (partially) a blog post written by ChatGPT too. Extraordinarily creative!
3. Advent of Code 2022 via C# - One of a handful of crossovers between the C# Advent and other advents. This post highlights another great advent and shows off C#.
🐣 Best Newcomer
The best content from someone who has never been on the C# Advent before. The criteria is a combination of all the above.
1. Jonathan "J." Tower - J is a long time C# developer community stalwart, and I'm happy to have him on board the C# Advent for the first time with Top-Level Statements in C#
2. Matthias Jost - Filled in for a dropped day with a great post that everyone can enjoy: How Do I Follow My Favourite .NET Blogs?
3. Brendan Enrick - Another long-time community contributor joins with 11 Ways of Making Your C# Harder to Use
👴 Best Veteran
Same as above, except for those who have posted to the C# Advent before.
1. Matt Eland - Thank you for your TWO contributions this year (one to fill in for a dropped day) - Text Classification in C# with ML.NET 2.0 and Interactive C# with Polyglot Notebooks
2. Jonathan Danylko - Has been a part of C# Advent since the beginning, thank you for Creating Multi-Tier Subscriptions using C#
3. Barret Blake - Another long time Advent contributor brings us Turning Any JSON API Into An App
Honorable Mention to Baskar Rao for being a veteran of every year AND having the most total contributions (seven - he contributed twice in 2017)
Thank you to everyone who participated! I've already started planning enhancements for next year. Be sure to watch mgroves on Twitter, the C# Advent site, and this very blog for announcements when the calendar gets toward the last third.
Thank you Smashing Magazine for featuring the Advent Calendars For Web Designers And Developers (2022 Edition) round-up.
Thank you Sergey Tihon for the inspiration.
A special extra thanks to Calvin Allen, who does a lot of behind-the-scenes work on C# Advent (including the domain name, LinkedIn, the CsAdvent twitter account, testing, and much more) even while juggling the arrival of a new family member. Congratulations and thank you!
