Chris Bowen's Blog : Books

Special "Meet the Authors" Event Next Week

cbowen — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 20:16:55 GMT

A free event has been arranged for next week to celebrate the release of three books featuring work by local Microsoft staff (including yours truly).

Microsoft’s own Scott Jamison, Steve Resnick, Richard Crane, Chris Bowen, and Rob Walters, along with Vitale Caturano’s Mauro Cardarelli, will be on-hand to meet, chat, and sign their books.

Tuesday, June 17th, 2008
Microsoft Technology Center
890 Winter Street, Waltham, MA
4:00 – 7:00 PM

FREE COCKTAILS AND FINGER FOODS!

BOOK AND SOFTWARE GIVEAWAYS!

Featured Books Include:

Essential SharePoint 2007 by Scott Jamison, Mauro Cardarelli, and Susan Hanley.

Essential Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) For .NET Framework 3.5 by Steve Resnick, Richard Crane, and Chris Bowen.

Accelerated SQL Server 2008 by Rob Walters, Michael Coles, Robin Dewson, and Fabio Claudio Ferracchiati.

Click Here to Register

Sponsored By:

See you there!

-Chris

"Essential WCF" on the Shelves!

cbowen — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 20:10:04 GMT

On The Shelf!

I popped in to my local bookstore (and ended up grabbing a copy of "LINQ in Action", which I've heard great things about) and what to my wondering eyes did appear, but hot-off-the-press copies of my latest authoring journey... "Essential Windows Communication Foundation"!

It's a great feeling to have all the research, coding, and long nights of writing actually take material shape on a shelf in a bookstore.

(Being a proud pop, I couldn't resist a side-by-side pic with my previous book, "Professional Visual Studio 2005 Team System".)

The InformIT Interview

We were recently contacted by informIT for an interview about the book, which you can read here - "So, What is This WCF Anyway?"

More about Essential WCF

Since we'd specifically timed the book to include details of .NET Framework 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008, we're among the first to cover some new WCF topics.

Here's a glance at what's inside:

Foreword xxv
Preface xxvii
Chapter 1: Basics 1
Chapter 2: Contracts 33
Chapter 3: Channels 91
Chapter 4: Bindings 111
Chapter 5: Behaviors 181
Chapter 6: Serialization and Encoding 241
Chapter 7: Hosting 287
Chapter 8: Security 315
Chapter 9: Diagnostics 375
Chapter 10: Exception Handling 403
Chapter 11: Workflow Services 423
Chapter 12: Peer Networking 459
Chapter 13: Programmable Web 503
Appendix: Advanced Topics 537
Index 553

I've already heard from a number of you who are delving into Essential WCF. Let me know if you have any feedback about the book.

I encourage you to take a moment to check out my coauthors' blogs:

Thanks Abound

Thanks to everyone who helped make this possible - my coauthors in "unbounded awesomeness"* - Steve and Rich, the great team at Addison-Wesley who kept the wheels turning well and in the right direction, and our technical reviewers who did a great job helping to ensure we were spot-on:

Nicholas Allen
Jeff Barnes
Keith Brown
Tom Fuller
John Justice
Ron Landers
Willy-Peter Schaub
Sowmy Srinivasan

Special thanks to Steve Maine, who not only provided great support during creation, but who also took the time to pen the book's forward.

And of course, thanks to you in the community for your support!

-Chris

* Note to Steve Toub, yes, that's the awesomeness' UBound() we're talking about. :)

Essential WCF to the Printer!

cbowen — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 18:02:52 GMT

In the rush of the past week, I forgot to post that "Essential Windows Communication Foundation" has gone to the printer and will be shipping soon!

I joined up with fellow New England area Microsoft guys Steve Resnick and Rich Crane (whose post reminded me to write this) to create this book and I'm very excited by the results.

One of our goals was to incorporate the new WCF features of the .NET Framework 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008. So, in addition to the core WCF topics, you'll also see coverage of areas such as RSS/ATOM syndication, peer networking, REST, Workflow integration, and new tools/integration with VS 2008.

Another goal was to have the book on shelves in time for the worldwide 2008 launch events (BTW, I'll be speaking at most of the ones in the northeast), and it seems that's going to happen!

For those of you who pick up a copy, you have our thanks! We hope it helps you along your way to creating fantastic WCF applications with .NET 3.x.

-Chris

Announcing: Essential Windows Communication Foundation

cbowen — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 15:33:09 GMT

Word's getting out, so it's time to acknowledge it on this blog.

If you were at TechEd, you may have noticed copies of a sample chapter of Essential Windows Communication Foundation being given out at the Addison-Wesley booth.

The eagle eyed among you (I heard from a bunch of people, actually) noticed the author listing on the front...

I'm very happy to be working with some of the best minds in WCF I know, Steve Resnick and Rich Crane. Steve and Rich are fellow Microsoft guys based at the Microsoft Technology Center in Waltham, where they work with customers on this technology every day. Steve and Rich are doing the lion's share of the chapters and I'm writing several chapters in my areas of speciality.

It's also good to be working on a .NET Development Series book, with a rich heritage of solid developer titles that have come before us in the series - Essential ASP.NET, Essential .NET, Framework Design Guidelines, and others.

So, when?

Look for the book near the time when Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 are released. That's certainly no coincidence as we're writing everything from the ground up to be current with the changes to WCF that those technologies are bringing.

-Chris

Technorati tags: WCF, Books, .NET 3.0, Windows Communication Foundation

Going Global

cbowen — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 21:19:34 GMT

I recently received a small package from Wiley. I opened it to find a copy of my book (Professional Visual Studio 2005 Team System.) Only this copy seemed... different. Why is Anaya Multimedia also listed on the cover? Why is "Professional" spelled "Profesional"?

It turns out our friends at Anaya in Madrid have been at work translating the book into a Spanish language edition. Very cool!

Everything from the chapter content, screenshots, and code comments, to the bios and acknowledgements have been translated. Need a chapter on unit testing? Try "Preuebas unitarias con el framework de pruebas unitarias"! Test case management? "Administracion de un caso de prueba".

It's a strange yet interesting thing to see your words when they aren't your words.

Hasta leugo!

-Chris