07 February 2006
A few people have asked how the book is coming along, so here’s an update.
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I touch each chapter a minimum of four times: to write it (AU), to revise it based on tech review comments (TR), to revise it based on copyedit questions (CE) and to do a final review after layout/typesetting (TS).
I am writing both the VB and C# books “concurrently”. What this really means is that I’m writing the book with one language, then skimming back through to change all language keywords, code blocks and diagrams to match the other language.
To practice what I preach (which is that you should be competent, if not fluent, in at least two languages) I am doing the book in C# and then converting to VB. It takes around 8 hours per chapter to do that conversion, 12 if there are a lot of diagrams to convert (code is easy – the damn graphics are the hard part…).
So, here’s the status as of this evening:
| Chapter |
C# |
VB |
| Cover |
AU done |
- |
| Front matter |
AU done |
- |
| 1 |
TS done |
TR done |
| 2 |
TS done |
AU |
| 3 |
TS done |
AU |
| 4 |
TS |
- |
| 5 |
CE done |
- |
| 6 |
CE done |
- |
| 7 |
CE done |
- |
| 8 |
CE done |
- |
| 9 |
CE done |
- |
| 10 |
CE done |
- |
| 11 |
TR done |
- |
| 12 |
TR done |
- |
People have also asked how much I expect the
CSLA .NET 2.0 public beta code to change between now and the book’s release at the end of March. Chapters 2-5 cover the framework, and as you can see those chapters are into the final editing stages. As such, I certainly don’t anticipate much change.
While I’ve made every effort to keep the VB and C# code in sync, there may be minor tweaks to the code as I roll through the VB chapters 2-5. But I’ve used both in projects and at conferences like VS Live last week, and both pass my unit tests, so those changes should be cosmetic, not functional.
In other words, the beta is pretty darn close to the final code that’ll be provided for download with the book.