March, 2010

Do you recognize this man? That’s Charles Petzold ! Looking stylish with the cover of his free ebook on his tee shirt. It’s a draft preview of his upcoming book (to be published in the fall): Programming Windows Phone 7 Series . This preview ebook contains six chapters in three parts (153 pages total): Part I Getting Started Chapter 1 Phone Hardware + Your Software Chapter 2 Hello, Windows Phone Part II Silverlight Chapter 3 Code and XAML Chapter 4 Presentation and Layout Part III XNA Chapter 5 Principles of Movement Chapter 6 Textures and Sprites Here’s a quick excerpt from the ebook: Chapter 1 Phone Hardware + Your Software Sometimes it becomes apparent that previous approaches to a problem haven’t quite worked the way you anticipated. Perhaps...

We’re thrilled to offer another free ebook: Own Your Future: Update Your Skills with Resources and Career Ideas from Microsoft , by Katherine Murray. The ebook contains eight chapters and an appendix describing how you can assess and build your technology-based job skills. To give you a sense of the ebook’s content, here is its Foreword, by Microsoft Learning’s Lutz Ziob: Foreword In the midst of a struggling economy, our fast-changing, knowledge-based economy has created unprecedented challenges for employers and workers alike. Employers increasingly need workers with a broad range of information technology (IT) skills. These skills will become even more important as we continue to retool major sectors of our economy, such as healthcare, transportation and energy. By 2014, more than three...

John Sharp’s new book, Microsoft Visual C# 2010 Step by Step , is now available! You can order it here or here , as well as many other places. Here are a couple of excerpts from the book. Enjoy! Introduction (excerpt) Microsoft Visual C# is a powerful but simple language aimed primarily at developers creating applications by using the Microsoft .NET Framework. It inherits many of the best features of C++ and Microsoft Visual Basic, but few of the inconsistencies and anachronisms, resulting in a cleaner and more logical language. C# 1.0 made its public debut in 2001. The advent of C# 2.0 with Visual Studio 2005 saw several important new features added to the language, including Generics, Iterators, and anonymous methods. C# 3.0 which was released with Visual Studio 2008, added extension...

NEW: The complete and final version of this ebook is now available here . We’re pleased to announce another free offering (following Charles Petzold’s Programming Windows Phone 7 Series (DRAFT Preview) , which we released on March 15): Moving to Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 (DRAFT Preview) . This DRAFT Preview contains three chapters from what will be a ten-chapter ebook when it’s released this summer. The three chapters make up Part II, “Moving from Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 to Visual Studio 2010.” You can download the DRAFT Preview of this ebook in XPS or PDF format here . Here’s some of the Introduction (<snip> marks a deletion, to shorten this post), which explains the book’s approach: Introduction Every time we get...

Great news! The MCITP Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-685): Windows 7 Enterprise Desktop Support Technician Training Kit , by Tony Northrup and J.C. Makin, is in print! This book is exactly what you need to help prepare for certification exam 70-685. Tony and J.C. give you plenty of lessons and exercises and the CD contains several practice tests too. You'll find all the standard Training Kit benefits: comprehensive coverage of all 70-685 exam objectives, 200+ practice test and lesson review questions, real-world scenarios, case study examples, troubleshooting labs, fully searchable eBook of the book’s contents, and a 15 percent exam-discount voucher from Microsoft. Here's an excerpt from the book's introduction: Introduction This training kit is designed for IT support personnel...

You might have seen our post yesterday, saying that we shipped John Sharp’s Microsoft Visual C# 2010 Step by Step . That post immediately received a comment saying “Great! I was looking for this new version of this book.” In case any of you are looking for other new versions of our books, today we’d like to quickly tell you about new editions (and one new book) we’ll be publishing in the next couple of months. First up is William Stanek’s Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Administrator's Pocket Consultant, Second Edition , which we’ll be shipping at the end of March. It updates this book for R2. William rocks on, obviously. Next is Ross Mistry and Stacia Misner’s Introducing Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 , which will be a free ebook and which updates this free ebook (no longer available for...

We’re happy to announce that Windows 7: The Best of the Official Magazine is now available. Today we offer an excerpt from the book. First, here’s a quick a description of it: Explore the practical, fun, and creative things you can do right now with Windows 7—with expert guidance from the editors of the only officially endorsed magazine for Windows 7. This guide comes packed with smart-and-simple tips-and vibrantly illustrated how-to's-on everything from navigating the Windows interface to taking advantage of new operating system features to fun projects for home, school, and work. Topics include boosting your productivity with Windows Live and Windows Internet Explorer 8, thwarting hackers, organizing your photo and music collections, making movies, streaming to an Xbox 360, controlling your...

We’re pleased to announce that John Sharp has revised his Visual C# Step by Step book: Microsoft Visual C# 2010 Step by Step went to the printer today! (You can read reviews of the previous edition of John’s book at Amazon .) Take a look at what the book offers: Contents at a Glance Part I Introducing Microsoft Visual C# and Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 1 Welcome to C# . 3 2 Working with Variables, Operators, and Expressions . 27 3 Writing Methods and Applying Scope . 47 4 Using Decision Statements . 73 5 Using Compound Assignment and Iteration Statements 91 6 Managing Errors and Exceptions . 109 Part II Understanding the C# Language 7 Creating and Managing Classes and Objects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129 8 Understanding Values and References . 151 9 Creating Value Types with Enumerations...

We’re happy to announce that Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Administrator's Pocket Consultant, Second Edition , by William Stanek, has shipped to the printer. The book’s ISBN is 9780735627383, the book includes 17 chapters and 736 pages, and it will be available after April 21. The book’s first edition has been updated for the R2 of SQL Server 2008. Below is more info about the book. Check back later for excerpts from the book’s chapters. Introduction Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Administrator’s Pocket Consultant, Second Edition, is designed to be a concise and compulsively usable resource for SQL Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 Release 2 (R2) administrators. It covers everything you need to know to perform the core administrative tasks for SQL Server and is the readable resource guide that you’ll...

Tony Northrup and J.C. Mackin’s new Traininig Kit has gone to the printer! MCITP Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-685): Windows 7 Enterprise Desktop Support Technician contains nine chapters and six appendices: Chapter 1 Troubleshooting Hardware Failures   1 Chapter 2 Networking   49 Chapter 3 Printers   105 Chapter 4 Security   129 Chapter 5 Protecting Client Systems   193 Chapter 6 Understanding and Troubleshooting Remote Access Connections   221 Chapter 7 Updates   269 Chapter 8 Performance   295 Chapter 9 Troubleshooting Software Issues   339 Appendix A: Configuring Windows Firewall   371 Appendix B: Managing User Files and Settings   395 Appendix C: Configuring Startup and Troubleshooting...

Hi all, Kimberly here. The Microsoft Press team met this month to dig into the feedback you gave us about .NET Framework Training Kits. (My thanks to everyone who completed the survey!) Three themes emerged from our analysis. I want to tell you what they are and how we plan to address them in the Training Kits that cover the .NET Framework 4 exams. Technical accuracy   By far, your biggest concern is errors. Even minor technical errors make you nervous about the overall accuracy of the book, and when you are studying for an exam, nervous is not good . As a standard practice, we hire technical experts to review every chapter, every block of code, and every practice test question in the book. In response to your concerns, our editors are updating our technical review guidelines to make...

I love print books. I like the way they feel and I like how I can picture pages in my head after I’ve read them. I like sticking post-it notes on pages that might be important to me again. I already stare at a screen all day reading email. Why would I want to read books on a screen – no matter if the screen is my monitor or an electronic reader? Yet, over the last few months, I’ve found ways to use PDFs and online libraries that make me rethink digital books – especially technical books like the ones we publish at Microsoft Press. I’m lucky enough to have a bookcase full of our books in my office. Sometimes I’ll take one home to learn something new, like SharePoint. However, if I have a specific question and don’t know which book can solve it best, I rely on searching through our entire...

We know that full TOCs help you determine whether an author has covered subjects to the depth you need. The full TOC for Jeffrey Richter’s just published CLR via C#, Third Edition   (ISBN: 9780735627048)   can be downloaded here . Here’s a collection of our posts sharing excerpts from and other information about Jeffrey’s book .

Last time we checked , in October, Windows Internals, Fifth Edition (Microsoft Press, 2009), by Mark Russinovich and David Solomon with Alex Ionescu, had received eight for eight 5-star reviews at Amazon. Now the book is up to eleven 5-star reviews out of eleven total reviews . To see why the book is on this streak, take a look at a sample chapter. Chapter 5, “Processes, Threads, and Jobs,” is available (116 gloriously detailed pages) here . This sample chapter also includes the book’s complete Table of Contents. Here’s an excerpt from one of the recent reviews, by Richard Sveyda: There is an awful lot of meat in this book. Some topics you'll want to skip, some you'll want to memorize: but it will put you at the front of the pack, because so much of what you learn is vital to being the best...

This beautiful book describing and illustrating the thinking behind the “Metro” UI was handed out at MIX10 . You can see the entire book here . And here’s a profile of Albert Shum , “one of the key thinkers behind the new Windows Phone 7 Series design.”

Hello, everyone. Kimberly Kim here, and I’m back with another call to action for passionate developer types. There are a few topics that keep coming up during our planning discussions for developer books. As you might expect, WCF, Data Services, and ASP.NET are on that list. But, increasingly, so are DLR and PHP. If you have a great idea for an original book about these topics or would like to contribute to one of our established series, we want to hear from you! Check out our book proposal guidelines here: http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/training/format-books.aspx#tab3 . Then, send us your name, your resume, and a brief description of your book in an e-mail message to 4bkideas@microsoft.com . Looking forward to reading you!

Last week I wrote a post about how I love books and recently used our e-reference library to find the CONCATENATE function in Excel. This week, though, I want to confess that I’ve learned most of my favorite tips and tricks in Excel and Access from friends and fellow co-workers. It’s amazing how few of the features and functions we all use in these programs. Whenever I hear about someone using a function or formula I’ve never used, I can’t wait to learn it. I’ll share a couple of my newly learned tricks with you here. I invite you to write comments to this post and tell us how you use a particular function. If you can, show us an example. CLEAN This function made me finally appreciate VLOOKUP. Almost everyone I know who works in spreadsheets uses VLOOKUP frequently. I’ve never liked it, though...