Jim Minatel's Wrox Book Editor Blog ASP.NET, XML, CSS, Ajax, PHP

Wrox at Microsoft Tech Ed 2008 Developer

Wrox will be at Microsoft Tech Ed 2008 in Orlando June 2-6 and of course we'd love to see you there. June 2-6 is Developer Week in Microsoft's new 2 week North America Tech Ed format. Some of the places you can find us at Tech Ed will be:

• At our booth in the Exhibit hall. We'll have several editors there throughout the week
• Party with Palermo: Wrox is sponsoring Party with Palermo again this year and at least a few of the staff will be there
• Plenty of Wrox authors are speaking at Tech Ed:
  • Andrew Connell: Don't Be a Tool, Be a Better SharePoint Developer through Tools!
  • Andrew Connell: Building High Performance Solutions on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007
  • Billy Hollis: From a Developer's Perspective: Intersecting Microsoft Expression and Microsoft Visual Studio 2008
  • Billy Hollis: Radically Different User Interfaces with Windows Presentation Foundation Data Templates
  • Billy Hollis: Radically Different User Interfaces with Windows Presentation Foundation Data Templates
  • Brian Knight: Performance Tuning Microsoft SQL Server Integration Services 2005 and 2008
  • Dustin Miller: Using Microsoft Visual Studio Tools for the Microsoft Office System and SharePoint Products and Technologies to Automate Document Creation
  • Heather Solomon: SharePoint Tools for Style: How to Start Branding SharePoint
  • John Holliday: Building Custom Routers for Records Management in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007
  • John Holliday: Building Document Management Solutions Using SharePoint Content Types
  • John Holliday: XOML, XOML, Everywhere: Building Custom Workflow Editors for SharePoint
  • John Holliday: Turning SharePoint Data into Microsoft Office Documents: A Deep Dive into SharePoint Document Assembly Using Open XML 
  • Robert Bogue: SharePoint Workflow Activities
  • Scott Cate: Understanding C# Lambda Expressions
  • Scott Cate: Microsoft Visual C# Compiler Tricks 
  • Scott Hanselman: Jumpstart Data Driven Web Applications with ASP.NET 3.5
  • Scott Hanselman: Extending Non-ASP.NET Applications with Microsoft Internet Information Services 7 and the Integrated Pipeline
  • Scott Hanselman: Car or Motorcycle: Choosing the ASP.NET MVC Framework 
  • Steven Smith: Black Belt ASP.NET Performance Techniques
  • If you're a Wrox author with a session I missed, please let me know!

Mike Griffin at indyalt.net

Mike Griffin did a great job showing entityspaces.net at the first indyalt.net last night. congrats to shane Milton and Jason brooks for successful launch of this group, thanks to sponsor tridgealliance.com, and thanks to blast from the past friend dean webber for tipping me off that it was coming via twitter!

new typepad native app for blackberry

i just installed typepad's new native application for blogging from my blackberry pearl. I'm using it now. it looks like it will be especially easy to blog photos using it.

Wrox Chapters on Demand: Buy PDFs of individual Wrox book chapters

Wrox Chapters on Demand is our new system to let programmers buy individual chapters from Wrox books. Launched yesterday with 47 Wrox books and approximately 900 individual chapters, programmers can now buy PDFs of just the chapters they need. Over the next week or two, we have another 37 books and 800 chapters staged and ready to roll out. Going forward, we'll make almost every Wrox book available by the chapter in Chapters on Demand as soon as the book is published, or even before print book availability in stores.

Right now, Wrox Chapters on Demand are available for purchase only from Wrox.com. We sell most chapters for $4.99 (US) although a handful of mega-chapters sell for $6.99 and $9.99. Every book also has 1 chapter available for free, typically chapter 1. With Wrox Beginning books in the program we also make the Answers Appendix available for free. And there are a handful of chapters and appendixes that are so short we're giving them away free too. Free chapters are sent by email, purchased chapters come from a secure download.

Wrox Chapters on Demand are sold as PDFs, with no DRM other than trust, subject to our terms of use. Like the Wrox Blox we launched last fall, chapters you buy are watermarked with your name and email address at the bottom of each page.

For any book available in Chapters on Demand, like Professional Visual Studio Extensibility by Keyvan Nayyeri the book's page at wrox.com features a new navigation tab for Chapters on Demand like you see here. There's a detailed description for each chapter so you know what you get before you buy it. This page shows just the first 2 lines of each chapter description, but the "more" link expands the description to show you the complete introduction from each chapter.

To see which books are available as Chapters on Demand at Wrox, look in any book list on the site like All Titles or ASP.NET. Books available as Chapters on Demand will have an additional Chapters on Demand link after their listing in the table.

   

Authors, we hope you like this great new way to get your expertise to programmers. If you have questions, please join in the private discussion in the Wrox author forum at p2p.wrox.com, ask me, or ask your editor.

Wrox First: Get Wrox Book's While They're Being Written

Yesterday we made publicly available our first Wrox First wiki, for the book Professional Microsoft Windows Embedded CE 6.0. The Wrox First wikis give programmers early access to Wrox books while they're still being written. In the case of Samuel Phung's Professional Microsoft Windows Embedded CE 6.0 book, so far we've posted 2 draft chapters and we'll post more chapters as they come in.

Every draft chapter will be posted and members can make comments and suggestions about each chapter. And then once the chapters have been reviewed and edited, we'll post the 2nd drafts as well. And members can comment on those too. And when the manuscript is final and at the printer, we'll post that again.

We've got several more books we plan to make available as Wrox First wikis in the near future, hopefully with the Silverlight 2.0 Programmer's Reference next up. We're still waiting for a useful beta or CTP of Silverlight 2.0 for the authors to make any real progress on that manuscript, but once we get some chapters based off of a beta that would be of use to programmers, we'll start posting those chapters too.

Membership is a bargain. Joining costs just a 1 time payment of $19.99 (US) per book. For programmers who need early access to must have content, that's a steal. The $19.99 payment gets members access to the whole book through all the writing stages, and continuing access to the final content in the wiki for 1 year after the book has published.

For authors, it's a great way to get reader feedback on your books before they're published. And for members who really want to be involved and make an impact, it's a way to make your mark on a book.

Authors, if you are interested in seeing your book in this program, let me or your Wrox editor know. We're going to be very selective about this with some criteria including:

• You have to be willing to read and respond to reader comments on the wiki ;)
• Your book has to be in the early writing stages, with you just getting started writing or only a few chapters in
• The book should be on a hot, coming topic, something there aren't already other books on.

professional asp.net 3.5 - a week in Amazon's top 50

What a week. When ScottGu blogged about the amazon discount on the Evjen, Hanselman, and Rader book professional asp.net 3.5 book, who knew that we'd end up with an advanced asp.net book at #5 on amazon for all books for a day.

That was Tuesday. As I write this Friday morning, the book remains wedged in the overall top 50 at #49.

Scott's blogged about our books before and it always sells a few. But nothing like this. And the discount was going well for amazon before Scott pointed it out on his blog but the two together, wow.

It's been a stir. Amazon stocked up on the book all through April, intending to do this sale earlier but even before the discount, the book sales were steadily increasing and the had to make more and larger reorders.

We could have never planned for sales like happened this week. Amazon blew through a month's worth of inventory in a few hours. They're now showing that their big catch up order will arrive tomorrow and after letting their customers know some orders would ship later than expected, I think they'll be able to start cacthing up tomorrow.

What a week. Bill, Scott, and Devin, I'm so happy for all of you. I hope you all printed and framed the amazon bestseller list.

typepad watching Twitter

Kudos to typepad for "getting it." 2 days ago I tweeted that typepad wasn't letting me login from blackberry. I got not 1 but 2 emails from typepad staff looking for details so they could fix it and I'm happy to say that as of right now, I'm typing in this post on m.typepad.com on my blackberry.

That's getting it. That's understanding the heart of "naked conversations." it's not about Blogs or any specific technology but about technology being a great enabler for actively listening to your customers.

Thanks Stephane and Andy!