Publishers Prepare for Year End .NET 4.0 Release

While Microsoft is coy about product release plans (“When it’s ready” is a common evasive answer to the question), book publishers frequently reveal their (and Microsoft’s) plans online.

If you’re curious about when software like .NET 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010 is likely to be available, the publishers’ catalogues are a pretty accurate guide. Publishers want their titles available on or shortly after a corresponding Microsoft release to grab the initial burst of consumer interest. Given that producing a professional computer book takes months of lead time, somebody is tipping off somebody. <grin>

Authors write their initial text using buggy/incomplete betas, rewrite the manuscript as the product churns and stabilizes, and scramble at the last-minute to match their code examples and descriptions to a release candidate (RC). If you look at a book’s screen shots, they’re almost always from late betas or the RC and not from the final release product. Layout of figures is not a last-minute thing.)

A search for ASP.NET 4.0 books on Amazon.com presages a release of ASP.NET 4.0 around the end of the year/early January 2010. (Wow, author Matthew MacDonald is a writing machine with all those titles!)

If you’re after C# 4.0, the planned publication dates are likewise clustered around mid-December to the end of January. The Visual Basic 2010 books seem to be later, with scheduled releases  (as of this writing) starting in February. Visual Studio 2010 and Team System 2010 books range from early November (unlikely) to April and May (late for early adopters). I note that C# 4.0 in a Nutshell by Joseph Albahari and Ben Albahari is due in mid-December.

Apress is clearly the most forthcoming about its titles and plans. A search for .NET 4.0 currently shows a big splash of Apress books hitting the shelves on December 28, 2009.

Don’t forget that there are different kinds of “final” software releases.  Microsoft can finalize the code for a product and make that product available for download in a matter of hours. However, it takes much longer to gets a glossy box containing Visual Studio 2010 on a DVD to a store shelf.

You can gauge product milestones fairly well by checking the scheduled keynote speeches by Microsoft people at industry conferences. Let’s see if the publishing industry serves as an accurate guide for predicting a final product release.

Ken

4 Comments

  • Hey Ken, it would be wonderful if they could get VS 2010/.net 4 out the door in January but it probably won't happen. It would be safe to expect Vs 2010 for the PDC in november. These books will probably be a first o preview edition for beta 2 with an updated release that ships soon after launch.

    VS 2010 will probably hit retail in May next year. Expect this release pattern to track closer to VS 2005 than VS 2008, which was a glorified feature pack - and mean that in a complementary way.

  • @mysterious: You could be right that January is overly optimistic. However, I'd say the computer book industry is in such bad shape that few (if any) can afford the limited run of a preview edition. It's hard enough to sell enough copies based on the RTM software.

  • I totally agree! Writers just simply scramble at the last-minute to match their code examples and descriptions to a release candidate (RC). Do keep sharing such info.

  • I've written a book, and you sign NDA's and work with MS to come up with a best guess for release. I suspect the publishers are pretty close to right unless there's a catastrophic show stopper.

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