Keyvan Nayyeri

Most likely you’ve noticed the recent decrease of activity on my blog and the temporary change in the content style. Like my anticipations for the first few weeks of the post-service era, I’ve been busy with some stuff that didn’t allow me to handle the load in the past few weeks and I guess that this progress continues until the end of November. There have been many reasons for this but one of the secondary reasons is the book that Simone and I have been working on: Beginning ASP.NET MVC.

It’s been quite a while since the last time that we gave an update on the status of this book, so I thought it’s good to share some news with our followers publicly especially because there have been some important news coming out of PDC 2008 in Los Angeles.

So far book has had a smooth progress and we have been able to write over 75% of the content. Honestly, we’re not behind the schedule but it doesn’t look like a big problem for the release date of the book.

Moreover, it looks like that we’ll stick with the current Table of Contest that consists of 20 chapters and an appendix. Recent bits of the ASP.NET MVC have shown that we don’t need to apply any changes in the structure of the book. We started writing the book when ASP.NET MVC was in an early preview stage, and since then we have experienced several changes in the product that even have been major changes but none of the changes have affected the structure of our book.

The other point is about the final release date of the book which was proposed for March 2009 but based on PDC 2008 talks as well as some other interviews with Phil, it’s a high chance that we cannot accomplish this deadline because ASP.NET MVC 1.0 wouldn’t be ready by the end of year. Of course, this is what we could extract from all these talks and interviews but there isn’t any official announcement about the final release date. I think that we’ll be done with writing in the next 2-3 weeks but then we would wait until the final release to apply some changes and review the content before sending the book to production.

Besides, I think that we’ll have an update on the title of the book to include the version number of ASP.NET MVC, so most likely it will be something like Beginning ASP.NET MVC 1.0.

We’re also going to start promoting the book and improve its sales, so I added a link to the book on my blog sidebar and am going to activate my Amazon blog and write about this new title on it. There would be some free copies to share for reviewers in later stages, something like what I did for Professional Visual Studio Extensibility, so you can keep an eye on Simone’s blog and mine.

Speaking of promotion, there have been a few community events in which our forthcoming book is showcases such as DotNetSide workshop in Italy where Simone introduced the book, and a user group in Bosnia where Dragan Panjkov talked about it.

By the way, I should finish my work on the book within next couple of weeks because I have an important exam to take abroad and it requires me to organize my schedule and finish these tasks before then.