Well, it has been a long since I last blogged and I’ve been incredibly busy the past year. I thought I’d share with you some of the things I’ve done and some of the things I’ll be doing.
First, my new book is finished and should be shipping to customers within a week or so. I just got 2 advanced copies of it earlier this week. I think this is my best book ever and I’m incredibly proud of it. This book is the 2nd edition of my “Applied Microsoft .NET Framework Programming” book. I changed the title to “CLR via C#” as the book really focuses on the CLR from the perspective of the C# programmer. You can find it here: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0735621632/sr=8-1/qid=1140158045/ref=pd_bbs_1/104-9334151-2570318?%5Fencoding=UTF8http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0735621632/sr=8-1/qid=1140158045/ref=pd_bbs_1/104-9334151-2570318?%5Fencoding=UTF8. This edition is pretty much a re-write from the first edition. I added a lot of content related to best practices, design guidelines, and versioning. And, of course, there is coverage of new CLR/C# 2.0 features such as generics, anonymous methods, friend assemblies, nullable types, etc. I also added 2 new chapters on asynchronous programming and thread synchronization.
There is a chance that we will produce a “CLR via C++/CLI” version of the book; I’ll know for sure in a few months. There will not be a VB version of the book as it has not proven to be cost effective. The source code for all the book’s code samples will be available on the Wintellect web site in mid- to late-March.
Second, I have been busy doing a lot of thread-related work. I am producing a course tentatively entitled “Effective use of .NET Threading in a Multi-Core Processor World.” I have noticed a big increase in developers focusing on how to take advantage of multi-core CPUs. In fact, this is why I now write the Concurrent Affairs column for MSDN magazine. Threading, synchronization, asynchronous operations, reliability, application responsiveness, and scalability have always been pet interests of mine for many years – my Win32 books had 5 chapters on the subject and I added 2 chapters on the subject to my new .NET book. I just love this stuff. I first start teaching this course at Microsoft in early March. If you’re interested in having me teach this course to you and your company, please contact our sales department.
Third, I like threading so much that I’ve started doing some contract work at Microsoft on a project of theirs called the Concurrency and Coordination Runtime (CCR). I’ll be writing about this soon in my MSDN Concurrent Affairs column. Until then, you can get a sneak preview of it by looking at a channel 9 video: http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=143582. This video will give a sense of it but don’t get too into the syntax yet because we’re changing the programming model significantly right now.
Fourth, I have been polishing up my .NET Power Threading library. This library has many useful classes in it for people who want to start taking advantage of threading stuff. The library has many thread synchronization locks (and diagnostic classes) that I wrote myself that have incredibly high performance. There is also my own thread pool and a set of asynchronous programming model classes that perform significantly faster than the CLR’s BeginInvoke stuff. Working on my course had caused me to really polish things up to the point where the code is commercial quality. I will be offering the library on the Wintellect web site some time in mid- to late-March. The library will be royalty free – please see the EULA that comes with the library for some minor restrictions on its use.
Fifth, I have also been playing around a lot with C# 3.0 features and will be doing the Devscovery keynote on C# 3.0. If you’d like to see it, please register at http://Devscovery.com/. I’ll also be presenting a bunch of talks on threading and reliability.
Sixth, I’ve also been spending a good bit of time on Windows Communication Foundation stuff. I’ve been reviewing and contributing a bit to our resident Indigo expert, Justin Smith, as he produces our Indigo course and he is also writing a book on Indigo to be published by Microsoft Press.
Seventh, I’ve also been spending a lot of time playing with Windows Vista. I run it in a VPC right now but I expect to install it and use it daily once beta 2 becomes available.
Anyway, there seems to be no shortage of technology-related things to play with and keep me busy. Now that the book project is done, I can really dive into this stuff and have some fun.
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p class=”MsoNormal”>On the non-technical front, my wife and I want to go on a well-deserved and long-delayed vacation. We’ll probably go to Sedona, AZ for sun and warmth – Seattle hasn’t had great weather the past few months and it’s starting to get to me. We’re also planning a long weekend trip to Whistler Mountain in Canada in a few weeks. I also look forward to spending some real quality time with my 3 year old son, Aidan. Aidan wrote the forward of my new book – you should check it out – he is very insightful for a 3 year old. There is a picture of he and I in the book too.