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What's New with Professional Visual Studio Extensibility?
My Professional Visual Studio Extensibility book was released in March 2008 (three months ago) and now it's harvest time for me and the book!
Since the last time that I gave some news about the book I received some new reviews, feedbacks and news about it that I'd like to wrap them up here.
The reason that I give such regular reports about the feedback is let everyone knows about the pros and cons of the content because reader's thoughts would be different from what I have already said about my own book. This can help others before ordering the book. Moreover, I learn from the feedback and try to improve things for newer books and possible new editions of this book in the future.
One of the newest reviews was on Amazon by William Sullivan who had some negative feedback about the book. William points that the book covers all VS extensibility options but in a shallow way. His review is chiefly based on this point and ends with a three points rate.
In answer to his review, I would agree with him in general and in some details. He's right about this fact and I knew it before the final print. When writing the book, I had something in mind to write a book that targets a general audience of experienced .NET developers and some guys with an initial background in VSX. My goal was to bring more people to VSX and make it a more general topic and didn't want to target current VSX developers with good experiences.
Reactions against the book are all based on this point. Those who never had any experience in VSX could find it very helpful and interesting while guys with a good background didn't find much information about the topic and even consider it useless. This was one of the points that I tried to describe about the content in pre-release days both in the Introduction section of the book and on my Amazon blog.
On the other hand, a short while ago Anand Narayanaswamy reviewed Professional Visual Studio Extensibility on C# Corner. In my opinion following part of the review mirrors it shortly:
The book is mainly oriented for advanced developers as it highly code intensive. Beginners should first learn the various features included with Visual Studio 2008 before attempting to work with the book. The author has paid great attention to present the complex content in a lucid style with supported screenshots. However, I feel that the author should have paid some time to provide meaningful titles for some of the chapters. I found inconsistencies in the naming of some of the chapters after going through the content. I hope it will be rectified in the next edition of the book. Professional Visual Studio Extensibility will be definitely a big bonus for advanced developers and for those who want to dig deep into the internals of Visual Studio.
I think that this review proves my abovementioned argument about the experience level! In answer to Anand's comment about the chapter titles I hope he could give some examples. I even renamed some chapters to have a better consistency but don't know which chapters had this problem.
But the other review about the book, a very positive one, is the newest review that got published on DotNetSlackers earlier today. Brian Mains was one of the contacts who were listed to receive a promotional copy of the book from Wiley for review on DotNetSlackers. His review covers all aspects of the book with positive feedback and at the end summarizes this review very well:
This book help whet my appetite for developing extensions, and I hope to develop one that is functional. The one caveat to this book is that it left me wanting to know more about extensibility, and I thought a few topics were cut short from what they could have been. I agree no book is perfect and explains every subject as the readers desire, but I felt that a few more examples, or a larger example in an appendix would have been a benefit to the readers.
I would thank Brian for this review. As he says, I could cover more details about some of the VSX topics and I also agree with him. But keep in mind that book writing experience is not just something that goes based on your observations. There are some other points in the writing experience that should be considered and sometimes they are in the opposite direction to what you desire. By the way, I think that I've covered all the topics related to extensibility options in enough details except about two topics including the Visual Studio Shell and Domain-Specific Languages Tools that need their own separate books and I don't think that anyone familiar with VSX can argue about this fact.
But the latest news that I'd like to mention here is about today's announcement of Visual Studio Ecosystem team that free copies of my book will be given to Visual Studio Extensibility Developer Conference 2008 attendees. I had written about this conference last week. This is very sweet and I'm happy to hear that. You can sign up for this conference for only $100.
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No Comments : 06.11.08