Keyvan Nayyeri

Today I finished writing manuscripts of my forthcoming book, Professional Visual Studio Extensibility.  23rd November was our expected date for checking in all manuscripts and I'm happy that I've been able to manage timeline very well.

Now that we're closer to finishing our work on the book and just need to review chapters in a few weeks, I want to begin promoting book and introducing it to the community.

Most likely current release date (end of March) is possible because everything is going on very well behind the schedule so we can expect the book to be out in four months.

Now that the cat is out the bag and Dave Gardner has published the Table of Contents of my book on Professional Visual Studio site, I want to share it here as well.  My book has 22 chapters and two appendices as follows and probably will be something between 500 to 600 pages approximately.

• Chapter 1: What is Visual Studio?
• Chapter 2: The .NET Framework
• Chapter 3: Quick Tour
• Chapter 4: The Automation Model
• Chapter 5: Add-in Wizard
• Chapter 6: The Anatomy of an Add-in
• Chapter 7: Manipulating the Solutions, Projects, and Project Items
• Chapter 8: Manipulating the Documents
• Chapter 9: Manipulating the Code and Build Process
• Chapter 10: The User Interface
• Chapter 11: Add-in Options Page
• Chapter 12: Debugging and Testing Add-ins
• Chapter 13: Deploying Add-ins
• Chapter 14: Localizing Add-ins
• Chapter 15: Visual Studio Shell
• Chapter 16: Domain-Specific Languages Tools
• Chapter 17: Extending Debugger
• Chapter 18: VSPackages
• Chapter 19: Code Snippets
• Chapter 20: Templates
• Chapter 21: MSBuild
• Chapter 22: Macros
• Appendix A: Third Party Add-ins and Extensions
• Appendix B: Resources

As a short description about the content (because the current description belongs to a canceled title and my book doesn't have an official description yet) I have to say that content depends on various aspects of Visual Studio Extensibility to describe its extensibility points as what is expected from a Wrox Professional series book.  Even though 13 chapters of the book are about add-ins but this doesn't mean that this is yet-another-book about Visual Studio add-ins and macros.  In these chapters (chapters 5 to 14) I used add-ins as a case study to describe Automation Model which is an important topic to learn for everyone who reads about VSX.

In this book, you read about some of main extensibility points in Visual Studio.  Of course, you may be surprised of seeing some topics such as MSBuild in this book but wait because I talk about it in a moment.  In this book you read about these extensibility options:

• Add-ins
• Macros
• VSPackages
• Debugger Extensions like Custom Debuggers, Type proxies and Debugger Visualizers
• Code Snippets
• Templates
• Visual Studio Shell
• Domain-Specific Languages Tools
• MSBuild

But why I included some topics like Code Snippets or DSL Tools?  Actually I grouped these options in three levels.  Some of them were direct extensibility points, some of them were intermediate points and some of them like MSBuild were topics that could be considered as an extensibility options though.  Moreover I covered them because anyone who works with Visual Studio professionally needs to knows MSBuild to some extent.

On the other hand, I used C# as the main language for the chapters except in two chapters where I was talking about Visual Studio Shell isolated mode and Macros.  For first chapter I used VC++ and for the second one I used VB because technically it wasn't possible to use C#.  However, this book is written for experienced .NET developers and they don't have any problem to read this book.  I had written about the reasons that I didn't write this book with multiple languages before so don't think it's necessary to repeat it here.

As other technologies that I used to write the book, it's written based on Visual Studio 2008 RTM and Visual Studio 2008 SDK 1.0 that just released a few days ago!

For some reasons this book is unique:

• There isn't any dedicated title about VSX.  There were 2-3 titles about add-ins and macros but didn't cover extensibility in general.  And of course, these 2-3 titles were written some years ago and new features and technologies have arrived and are going to kick them out of date.
• Even though there were 2-3 titles about add-ins and macros but they were written for Visual Basic not C# and there was a good demand for such a title with C#.
• Book heavily relies on simplicity and tries to teach the concepts.  I avoid from some topics that every reader knows and trusted on the knowledge on my readers.  I tried to break the complexity of Visual Studio Extensibility (that I outlined here) and make things simpler rather than bringing that complexity to the book and just try to repeat it with my own words.

All in all, I just wanted to give you some more details about the book.  I'll write more about the content in future when we got closer to the release date.  For now, I want to promote the book so added it to my blog sidebar with a link to Amazon for pre-order.  You can also pre-order the book on Wiley which delivers it to you sooner than Amazon.

It's enough for now!  I'll give more details about the book in the future.

The process of writing manuscripts took five months.  These five months were one of hard parts of my life because I had to pass my service and write this book together.  Personally I'm very meticulous for the quality of my works so spend much time and effort on them.  So you can guess, how hard was that to manage this life with this limited time and especially when most of times I was so tired at home!

However, this is a good technique for adoption in life that I've experienced many times (my next book would be a book about life hacks).  You put yourself under pressure and try to adapt yourself with this life then when you get out of the pressure, can do lots of other things that normally you can't manage to do!  So now that I have more free time I want to get back to regular life and refresh this blog and revisit my open source projects to have new releases in next couple of months.

In this while, my limited time didn't let me to keep up the old blogging style and probably regular visitors noticed a change in my writing style but now that Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 are released, I want to cover new technologies more and more.  The other change on this blog was the number of posts about VS and VSX and now that I'm blogging on Professional Visual Studio, want to write about these topics there which is the better place for such topics.

I also want to read some programming books because it's been a long time that I've been reading general software development and software architecture books.