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

Working on Web 2.0: The book

I'll add it to my blogging author directory on the left as soon as we get the cover on Amazon but for now, I'll just drop this little post about it. For the past couple of months I've been working with a really neat set of authors on a fascinating project: Professional Web 2.0 Programming. They've set up a handy little site for Professional Web 2.0 Programming that aggregates the blog feeds from all of the authors, the tech reviewer, and even the occasional rambling from yours truly.

What I really love about working with this gang of authors:

• Eric van der Vlist
• Danny Ayers
• Erik Bruchez
• Joe Fawcett
• Alessandro Vernet

and Micah Dubinko (Tech Reviewer) is how relentless they are about communicating and collaborating with each other. We're a geographically dispersed team spanning 4 countries in Europe as well as multiple states in the U.S. and the email never seems to stop between them with ideas and feedback on each others' work. I have a hard time remembering another book where I've had the chance to see the authors grow the project the way I have with this one. (Disclaimer: I'm sure a lot of my other author teams do this, I'm just not always in the loop on the conversations.) It's really fantastic. And they're taking nice advantage of some other content management and collaboration tools to make the most of the technology in improving the project.

And, for the most part, they hit their deadlines.Always a plus in my world.

So, serious props to this team and I'll be telling you more about this book soon.

Yes, BTW, I know there will be some criticism of the idea of a Web 2.0 book.

MS Teched 2007: New Orleans!

As has been sporadically rumored last week at Tech Ed 2006 and various blogs, TechEd 2007 is scheduled for June 3-8 in New Orleans according to MSFT's future tech ed page.

As a few readers of this blog know, I've dedicated a little of my time to a relief trip to NOLA already, going there for a week of deconstruction work last Nov. I'm completely stoked about going there on business for TechEd next year and hope to find a way to organize a group of TechEd relief workers who would go down a few days early and do some rebuilding work. Sounds like fun!

Who's in with me? Randy H? I know you've got ties to the area. Courtney? If I can find people can you help me find a group to match it to work? Authors, tech editors, if you are reading this and think you might attend TechEd, let's make this a TechEd we can all really remember.

Wally McClure "Atlas" video posted from Atlanta Code Camp

We've posted the next video in our series of hand-on technical videos for programmers at Wrox.com. This one is from Wrox author Wally McClure on the topic of Microsoft Atlas. Wally goes through about a half dozen major examples in the code for this presentation including Getting data asynchronously from the server, listview, update panel, Namespaces/Classes, and more. Total video length is 43 minutes.

I made a few changes to the video format for this that I think are improvements.

First, since there's no real "action" on screen, I dropped the frame rate way down. This makes the video file much smaller than the previous ones.

Second, because of the lower frame rate, I was able to increase the video resolution up to 1024x768, which is the resolution Wally ran the presentation in, and still kept the file size fairly small. Keeping his resolution makes the coding he does on screen visually crystal clear. The handful of PPT slides still have some artifacts but they are very legible and useful anyway. I hope that the 1024x768 video size isn't a hinerance to anyone who really needs it smaller for some reason.

This is the last video from the Atlanta Code Camp. I really have to thank that whole gang again: Jim Wooley, Brandon Schwartz, Matt Ranlett: thanks for letting us be part of this and experimenting with us.

Next up in the video queue: I've got 105 minutes of video from Scott Hanselman, not from a Code Camp but from the Beantown.net user group last week. I'm probably break this down into 4-5 smaller clips and start posting them after July 4.

Need more LINQ than teched? Wrox 66 minute LINQ video available

Thanks again to the great gang at Atlanta Code Camp, we've got another Wrox.com video posted to share with you. I was a little surprised by how little LINQ coverage there was here at TechEd, so whether you were at TechEd and are wanting more or missed TechEd and want a first glance at this, we're happy to share Jim Wooley's presentation from last month's Atlanta Code Camp titled "VB 9.0/C# 3.0 and the Search for the Missing LINQ."

And thanks again to hosting.com for their support of this project through the great hosting they provide.

Stefan Schackow - teched speaker - new Security article at Wrox.com

Stefan Schackow spoke at teched Tuesday on "ASP.NET: Under the Covers - Creating High-Availability, Scalable Web Applications." We posted Stefan's newest excerpt article from his Wrox book Professional ASP.NET 2.0 Security, Membership, and Role Management on Wrox.com this week. Here's the beginning of the article titled "Redirecting Configuration with a Custom Provider."

A common issue with Web applications is that applications are managed in various environments. Aside from development environments, you may have test servers, staging servers, live production servers, and potentially warm backup servers. If you store selected Web configuration sections in a central location (such as a central file share or a central configuration database), you have a more manageable solution and, depending on how you implement this, a more secure solution as well.

With ASP.NET 2.0, you can write a custom protected configuration provider that determines information about the current server and the currently running application. A custom provider can reach out to a central repository of configuration information and return the appropriate configuration information. When you have a group of individuals who manage the configuration data for live production servers, it is probably much easier to have such a group manage updates to a single database as opposed to synchronizing configuration files across multiple machines.

Implementing a custom protected configuration provider requires you to derive from the System.Configuration.ProtectedConfigurationProvider class. As you can see, the class signature is very basic:

You can dive into the code with Stefan in the rest of the article.

Wrox authors photos from teched: Hanselman, Evjen, Yack, and Little

It's been a great week to chat and mix with Wrox authors. Here are a few of them who slowed down their busy schedules for a minute for a photo op:

• David Yack (left) watches while a customer (2nd from left) discusses the new book ASP.NET 2.0 MVP Hacks and Tips with Scott Hanselman (far right) and J. Ambrose Little (2nd from right) looks on. There had been a sizable crowd looking for the book signing but unfortunately, the bus troubles here this week slowed Scott from getting to the signing leaving a few customers disappointed to have missed seeing Scott in person.
• A better shot of J. Ambrose Little (left) and David Yack next to him with Scott Hanselman and a reader in the background. J. Ambrose Little's company Infragistics picked up two "Readers Choice" awards and several more Merit Awards Wednesday night at the Fawcette Visual Studio Magazine Reader's Choice awards ceremony.
• Scott Hanselman stopped by the booth to show off his power-lifting skills, hoisting a Wrox Box.
• Bill Evjen, we see that DotNetNuke shirt you've got there.

Of course there were many, many more authors than I can remember who stopped by as well as tech editors and "friends of Wrox" - the MVPs, RDs, user group leaders and so on who are the backbone of the .NET community. Thanks to you all for your tremendous support of Wrox and the great feedback you've been giving us.

Also posted today: New Scott Hanselman ASP.NET Hacks article

If you can't attend TechEd 06 and see Scott Hanselman speak there, if you won't see him at the Beantown.net user group, and you haven't yet bought ASP.NET 2.0 MVP Hacks and Tips, which he contributed to with 6 other ASP.NET MVPs, then here's a short article over on wrox.com that you should find interesting. Here's the beginning of the article:

Two ASP.NET HttpHandler Image Hacks
By Scott Hanselman

Every HttpRequest that comes into ASP.NET is handled by an HttpHandler. It seems like a silly thing to say, but it's true. The IHttpHandler interface is the magic that makes it all happen. Every page you write is indirectly an HttpHandler. Every file that is requested is mapped to an HttpHandler. In this excerpt from Chapter 17, "Handlers and Modules," of ASP.NET 2.0 MVP Hacks and Tips you'll see two of the four specific HttpHandler hacks to get you started.

Discouraging Leeching Using an Image-Specific HttpHandler
Bandwidth leeching happens when you have an image hosted on your site and another site links directly to your image using an <img> tag. The page serves from the other site, but the image is served from yours. Browsers typically include the name of the host that obtained the request. Images that are requested from your web server by a page hosted elsewhere will have a referrer header that doesn't match your site's URL.

And the complete article is here.

First Wrox video posted: Live from Atlanta Code Camp - VS2005 Team System

I hinted a while back at some exciting things Wrox is trying to do in the .NET community with CodeCamp. We know not everyone has a codecamp near by. When know not everyone can go. We know not everyone can afford more expensive conferences and travel like tech ed. So, we're bringing the best of CodeCamp to you on wrox.com.

Today we have the first results of this for you to see. In cooperation with Atlanta CodeCamp, we have on wrox.com a 68 minute video of Jean-Luc David's "Extending Visual Studio 2005 Team System" presentation. Jean-Luc is also the lead author of Wrox's Professional Visual Studio 2005 Team System.

The video is a screen capture with Jean-Luc's audio as he presented this. In keeping with CodeCamp philosophy, the presentation was almost all hands on coding. He started out with about 5 minutes of PPT introduction and then stayed in VS team System showing and writing code for the remainder of the hour plus presentation.

He have a couple more of these videos recorded and in the pipeline and more on the way. In the next few weeks look for additional videos from:

• Jim Wooley from Atlanta Code Camp on LINQ
• Wally McClure from Atlanta Code camp on Atlas
• Scott Hanselman from Beantown.net user group

Many thanks and credits to:

• Thom Robbins and the uber-CodeCamp people for agreeing to let us be a part of their success and do this
• Jim Wooley, Brendon Scwartz and the rest of the Atlanta Code Camp and Atlanta .NET Regular Guys for putting on a great CodeCamp and letting us use their event as a guinea pig
• Jim Wooley, Wally McClure, and Jean-Luc David for coming through with almost no notice and trying this for me
• Robert Scoble and Channel9: Your site was the inspiration for this.
• Derek Comingore, Wrox author and hosting.com employee, for being a good guy and for introducing me to Jonathan at hosting.com to broker the deal for their excellent hosting service.
• After I had this under way, I saw another code camp presenter who had posted his own video of his presentation. I can't find the link at the moment, but if anyone knows who that was, or if their are more, let me know and I'll give them props here.

Marco Bellinaso's ASP.NET 2.0 Website Programming an Amazon bestseller!

Woo-hoo! Congrats to Marco Bellinaso for his book ASP.NET 2.0 Website Programming Problem Design Solution which in the last 2 days has jumped into the Amazon top 1000 overall (as high as #22 on Computer and Internet bestseller list yesterday). And on a daily basis, it's started to edge out our Professional ASP.NET 2.0 for the overall best-selling ASP.NET 2.0 book. Way to go Marco! And it's a real thrill for Wrox to currently have the #1 and #2 ASP.NET 2.0 books on Amazon, whatever order they are in.

I think Francesco Balena really hit on a reason for the book's popularity in the foreword he wrote when he said:

"In fact, unlike most real site authors, Marco was able to take all the time he needed to implement an impressive list of features and fix all the bugs he encountered. And unlike most sample application authors, he never took a shortcut and never ignored the problems that developers have to solve every day in the real world. Chapters 5 and 9, on articles/news management and the e-commerce module, took him longer than any other portion of the book. As a result of his scrupulous efforts, the overall quality exceeds what you might expect from a mere “book sample,” and it’s currently the best demonstration of ASP.NET 2.0’s new features..."

I know for a fact that Marco spent a ton of time on the code. Before he even wrote the first chapter of the book he'd spent 1-2 months and 100 hours, maybe more, coding the sample project. And I know a lot of authors sometimes point a finger at their editor, the publisher and say they were rushed to write. Well, I probably do that occasionally but I'm going to brag a bit here and say I never rushed Marco for this. When he said he needed more time for the code, the project, he got it. Yes, we encouraged him to get done, but code quality and overal quality of the project were important factors.

BTW, I see a couple of new competing books publishing next week, I'd assume in time to have books at Tech Ed. Alex Homer and Dave Sussman's new ASP.NET 2.0 Illustrated is due out. Alex and Dave are great guys and I'm sure this book is up to their A+ standards, like everything they've written for Wrox in the past. I can't wait to see it. And although I don't know him personally, Steven Walther's ASP.NET 2.0 Unleashed has a pub date on Amazon that suggests it will be at Tech Ed next week and I've always heard very good things about his unleashed book in the past. Welcome to the ASP.NET 2.0 fun guys! The more the merrier.

See Wrox at Tech Ed booth 630-632

Wrox authors, tech editors, readers, friends of Wrox, haters, everyone. Stop by and see me and some of the other Wrox editors at the Wiley booth (630-632) during TechEd US. At a minimum, I'll probably be in the booth during these times:

• Monday: 6-9pm
• Tues: 11:30-2
• Wed: 11:30-3
• Thurs: 11-3

Unless I've stepped out for a coffee or some of those baby carrots Scott Hanselman raved about last year.