• Jason Zander has a great post explaining a lot of the new functionality.
• Phil Haack gives the low-down on ASP.NET MVC with this beta.
• The documentation has also be released to MSDN.
• On Twitter everyone is discussing this using the #vs10 hashtag.

Everyone else has another chance of winning one of the 6 remaining books starting right now. To enter the competition you need to either:

• Write a comment on any post (it doesn’t have to be this one); or
• Link to this blog from your own website/blog (We accept trackbacks, or you can let us know about the link via email).

At the end of November we will draw two new winners at random from those who participated during this month.

The competition is open to everyone. If you are lucky enough to be drawn as a winner, we will contact you via email before announcing the winners. Winners will need to provide us with their name, telephone number, and shipping address.

This competition has been made possible due to the generosity of our publisher, Wiley Publishing.

Good luck!

Download the free sample chapter [PDF 2.6Mb]

This free chapter covers the following:

• Web Application vs. Web Site Projects
• Creating Web Projects (Both Web Site and Web Application projects)
• Designing Web Forms (The HTML Designer, CSS Tools, Validation Tools)
• Web Controls (Navigation, User Authentication, Data Components, Web Parts)
• Master Pages (Including Nested Master Pages)
• Rich Client-Side Development (JavaScript, ASP.NET AJAX, AJAX Control Extenders)
• ASP.NET Web Site Administration (Security, Application Settings)

Also don’t forget that today is the last day to enter our monthly competition for your chance to win your very own copy of Professional Visual Studio 2008.

As for everyone else who entered, don’t despair, the October edition of the competition begins right now, so you still have a chance of winning one of the 8 remaining books.

As with last month, to be in the running you need to either:

• Write a comment on any post (it doesn’t have to be this one); or
• Link to this blog from your own website/blog (We accept trackbacks, or you can let us know about the link via email).

At the end of October we will draw two new winners at random from those who participated during this month.

This competition is open to everyone. If you are lucky enough to be drawn as a winner, we will contact you via email before announcing the winners. Winners will need to provide us with their name, telephone number, and shipping address.

This competition has been made possible due to the generosity of our publisher, Wiley Publishing.

Good luck!

To be in the running you need to either:

• Write a comment on any post in this blog;
• Link to this blog from your own website/blog (We accept trackbacks, or you can let us know about the link via email).

At the end of each month we will draw two winners at random from those who participated during that month.

This competition is open to everyone (regardless of where you reside). If you are lucky enough to be drawn as a winner, we will contact you via email before announcing the winners. Winners will need to provide us with their name, telephone number, and shipping address.

This competition has been made possible due to the generosity of our publisher, Wiley Publishing.

Good luck!

So we’re asking for suggestions as to which chapter we should make available. You can view the list of chapters here, or download the full Table of Contents from Wrox. You should let us know which chapter you’d like to see, by commenting on this post or sending us an email via our contact page.

We’ll also have an announcement in the near future about how you can win free copies of the book as part of a promotional giveaway. This will be open to those who live outside of North America. More details to come very soon.

Once you get your hands on a copy of the book, don’t forget to download the associated source code from Wrox.

We’re also excited to announce that Wiley Publishing have advised us that it will be translated into Simplified Chinese. We will update you as soon as we hear any further information on the availability of that version.

We’ve requested some promotional copies from the publisher to give away to the readers of this website. The details of this are still being worked out, as we are hoping to ensure that it’s not limited to U.S. residents only. Stay tuned for more information on this in the near future.

We sincerely hope you find Professional Visual Studio 2008 to be a useful resource. We very keen to hear feedback on the book (both positive and negative), so if you have any comments or questions, please comment on a post in this blog or send us an email.

The last five months have been pretty hectic for both Nick and I, as Visual Studio 2008 has consumed most of our waking hours in one way or another. Visual Studio has even entered my dreams a couple of times, but I’ll save that story for my therapist Writing a book while maintaining a full-time job was certainly very challenging, but I’ve learnt so much that I never would have found the time to learn otherwise.

We were also lucky to have three excellent guest authors on this book – Miguel Madero, Keyvan Nayyeri, and Joel Pobar. Miguel wrote 5 chapters on the different Team System Editions and TFS. Keyvan authored 3 chapters on Automation and also helped out as a technical editor on a bunch of chapters. Joel contributed a chapter that explained the different types of programming languages (imperative, declarative, dynamic, and functional) that included a great walkthrough of F#.

While I’m going to take it a little easier for a couple of months now, I now finally have time to share some of the things that I’ve discovered over the last few months.

There were some subtle clues due to the very silly statements I made in the post:

“Whilst this implementation might have been ok back in the late 90’s”

[Editors note: The first version of .NET wasn't released until 2002]

“…the sender parameter is the one you want, as it will give you the details on who invoked the event (i.e. who was the “sender”)”

“…as you probably know string comparisons can be very slow, so for performance reasons I recommend you compare the User property.”

and this one which is my favourite, because it is so wrong, but sounds like I know what I’m talking about:

“…Windows XP Service Pack 2, which changed the code for the WindowsIdentity class from running in User mode to running in Kernel mode.”

Hopefully my somewhat dry sense of humour didn’t catch anyone too much off guard. As far as April Fools Day jokes go, the clues on this one weren’t particularly obvious, so don’t feel bad if you weren’t paying enough attention to realise. I solemnly promise that everything I post from now on will be totally legitimate with no trickery involved (for the next 364 days at least)!

Scott Guthrie has posted a list of the problems these hot-fixes solve, and the instructions of how it install.