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Happy new year all -- I hope 2008 was a good year for you and that 2009 will be better. I myself was crazy busy at the end of 2008, working on a number of at-work projects and personal projects which I'm not going to blog about at this time. I hope to get more time in the schedule for blogging in the next couple of months.

CSharpThirdEdition

I want to start off the year with the belated announcement that we have shipped a printed and bound version of the C# 3.0 specification. Why would you want the dead-trees version when you can just get the Word document off the web? Because the print edition is annotated.

Yes, we were fortunate enough to get Brad Abrams, Joseph Albahari, Krzysztof Cwalina, Jesse Liberty, Fritz Onion, Vladimir Reshetnikov, Chris Sells, Bill Wagner, plus me, to write annotations for those areas of the specification that we each found interesting.

There are lots of good comments that elucidate tricky bits, give historical context, provide advice and guidance, rail against restrictions, and so on. My only complaints are that the annotations are so brief and that I wish I had had the time to more fully annotate every bit of the spec. But then again, that's a big part of what this blog is for, so I shouldn't complain too much.

 

Published Monday, January 12, 2009 8:37 AM by Eric Lippert
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Jon Skeet said:

I can wholeheartedly second this recommendation. It's got a lot of good stuff in.

I would also recommend getting the annotated ECMA C# 2.0 spec - obviously it's a bit older, but it's interesting to see how the annotations vary between the "mainly MS" and "mainly not MS" versions.

I look forward to the 3.0 version being out of date though...

Jon, who had a good 2008 in no small part due to Eric's efforts...

January 12, 2009 5:39 PM
 

pejvan said:

It's a great one! I had the 2nd edition, which I read twice, and I have started now the 3rd edition, and the annotations are fantastic!

January 13, 2009 8:58 AM
 

Martin Bertolino said:

I think it is great to have the annotated version.  It is not good to kill some trees for it.  It would be greater to push Addisson Wesley to start publishing their books in electronic format in the same way that O'Reilly, Manning, APRESS do.  I have sent them (AW) a note but they showed no interest on this.

Maybe if authors start favoring publishers that support electronic formats it would force some other publishers to re-think their strategies.

MSPRESS is another one that I don't believe supports electronic formats.  I'm going to go check now...

January 13, 2009 10:10 AM
 

Charlie Calvert's Community Blog said:

Welcome to the 48th Community Convergence. The C# team continues to work hard to get out the next version

January 14, 2009 12:03 AM
 

Abraham Tehrani said:

Congrats on the new book and a Happy New Year!

January 14, 2009 12:16 PM
 

Tom said:

This is really a great book, useful as a reference and for learning C# more deeply. I read it mostly cover-to-cover and found it very interesting, and now it sits on my shelf as a ready reference.

March 6, 2009 2:34 PM

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About Eric Lippert

Eric Lippert is a senior developer on the Microsoft C# compiler team. Before that he worked on the framework of Visual Studio Tools For Office. Before that, he worked on the compilers, runtimes and tools for VBScript, JScript, Windows Script Host and other Microsoft Scripting technologies. He lives in Seattle and spends his free time editing books about programming languages, playing the piano, and trying to keep his tiny sailboat upright in Puget Sound.

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