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.

As I wrote on my main blog, my book, Professional Visual Studio Extensibility, officially released today and you can order it on Wiley or Wrox sites. There are already sample PDF files and code downloads for the book available on these sites.

It should be also available on Amazon and Barnes and Novel shortly and those who have pre-ordered it should receive it in next couple of weeks.

I’ve written more details about the book on my blog that you can read there. It’s a pleasure to finally see the book getting out to markets and finding its way to bookshelves. Readers of this blog who had left comments to receive free copies of my book and got my confirmation should receive their copies in a few days because they will be sent today or tomorrow.

I’m looking forward for feedbacks from readers. Some reviews will be published on .NET communities and blogs in next couple of months that can help others to decide whether they want to order my book.

I have to thank Nick and Dave for helping me on book promotion on this blog. We will be able to get our hands on Professional Visual Studio 2008 in a few months which is a great complementary for my book.

Firstly, on advice from Keyvan (the expert on this topic), we’ve condensed the Automation section from 5 chapters down to 3. You’ll just have to purchase a copy of Professional Visual Studio Extensibility so that you can deep-dive into this topic properly.

Secondly, we’ve moved Client Application Services into a separate chapter of its own. From what Nick told me, it became evident pretty quickly that it was a big enough topic to justify this.

Finally, and what I’m most excited about, we’ve added a chapter titled “Next Generation Web: Silverlight and ASP.NET MVC“. This will cover these two very exciting new technologies from Microsoft. I’ll be focusing as much as possible on Silverlight 2.0 – from the sounds of it, there will be a beta and Go-Live license by Mix 08 in early March. This will be just in time to slip into the book before my final deadline. Also the ASP.NET MVC Framework, which is quite simply the best thing to happen in the world of Microsoft web development since ASP.NET v1.0, will be getting some decent coverage in the book.

Since this is the blog where we’re writing about Visual Studio and we’re promoting our books on it, I decided to share free copies for its readers as well.

So the first three guys who live in United States or Canada and leave a comment with their email address for this post and promise to write a review for the book somewhere on the web (in English) can get these free copies.

As I wrote on my main blog, doors are open for you if you think you can help promoting the book somehow so don’t hesitate to contact me about this. We’re also ready to share free copies with user groups and give good discounts to all companies that want to order large quantities of the book.