How a Book Gets Written: Professional WinFX Beta

I just read a fantastic post by Jim Minatel outlining the process of developing and writing Professional WinFX Beta. The entire story is true - it was quite a challenge to keep up with the changes affecting Longhorn at the time. I recently got a physical copy of the book in my hands and I'm really pleased with the results! A huge thanks goes out to Bill Ryan, Ron DeSerranno and Alexandra Young for helping co-write it.

One of the lessons learned is that the success of a book project not only hinges on the quality of writing and the authors but also the support of the editorial team! I'm in the process of updating my source code to work with the PDC version of WinFX (aka the WinFX Sept CTP) - you'll be able to download full working versions of the apps outlined in the book and the updated source code in the near future. I'll post the links once my chapters are ready! (FYI, the code and information in the book is based on Beta 1).

In the meantime, you may want to download the PDC builds of WinFX. Download the WinFX SDK here (rename the file extension from ".img" to ".iso" - 452 MB): http://download.microsoft.com/download/9/4/0/940d82b5-17a2-4473-9d03-63d00e02502d/2.0.50215.322.226.WinFXSDK_idw.img

You can also download different flavors of the SDK (x86, x64 & ia-64) at the following site: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=C20CC6C8-1F4E-4A5C-BC79-C2FE9ABE69AA&displaylang=en

The WinFX Runtime Components are available here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=FFD636F0-86E9-41E8-9E1C-100A4CC4888F&displaylang=en

The Visual Studio Extensions for WinFX are available here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=EDE1A645-2A53-42E1-8482-3BF1FADADE06&displaylang=en

Once you have installed everything, the next step is to check out the online September CTP WinFX SDK documentation (including great new information about the Windows Workflow Foundation): http://winfx.msdn.microsoft.com/library

I recently gave a presentation at the East of Toronto .NET User group on the Windows Communication Foundation. As luck would have it, my demos failed again! (see this post more background). Fortunately, the talk went well overall - a few of us resumed the meeting at the local Tim Horton's where I finally revived one of my planned demos. In case you are wondering, I followed my own advice from the previous blog entry. Lessons learned: next time, if it's a pre-Beta or Beta technology I will do a canned demo no matter what! The presentation deck will soon appear on the user group website.

A few cool WinFX related items I have noticed over the weekend:

- Channel 9 has an amazing XAML Demo created by North Face: 
Here is the video: http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=116327
Here is an explanation on how they did it: http://msdn.microsoft.com/windowsvista/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/dnlong/html/fluid.asp

- Some of the 2005 PDC slides are available on the web:
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3A216.55.183.63%2Fpdc2005%2Fslides