Ok, so this is just a very brief soapbox moment, but it’s really getting annoying. Obviously, unless someone intervenes, things live forever on the internet and Mr. Google (or Mr. Bing or Mr. Yahoo – not trying to be discriminatory) is happy to find anything for you. Given that and the tremendous amount of great information to be found on tech blogs, I have one simple request:

Put the date at that top of the post!!! (Please.)

A couple of my more recent projects have been using the wonderful new MVC engine for ASP.NET. It’s been a great learning experience on several levels and while I’m not rushing out to replace all of the solid WebForm based applications I have in production, it's a very viable alternative for projects going forward. However, not having a tremendous amount of experience with the methodology, I find myself having to research a lot of the core concepts to get my head around best practices, especially for real world, multi-tier production apps.

That’s where the trouble comes in. Through the Beta and Preview stages of MVC, the team was iterating very fast (a great thing IMHO) and the community was producing so much great material which means there’s a ton of excellent information out there. Except, there were a lot of breaking changes and re-factoring that went on between releases. Therefore, you can easily come across an article that seems to solve your exact problem only to find out that solution doesn’t work in the production release. The easiest way to rule that out is check the date the article was written. That’s when you discover exactly how many blogs (and content systems) don’t put a post date at the top. You have to scroll all the way to the end of a really long article just to find out whether you should bother reading it to begin with. Is it really too much to ask that you tell me up front when the material was posted so I can make an informed decision?

OK, I think I may obviously need to do just get a grip so I’ll hop off my soapbox. Thus endeth this evenings useless rant . . .