Top-notch tools at rock-bottom prices. Enjoy.

Mike and I submitted our last round of comments to the WinForms 2.0 book last night. The way it works is, after we submit the “final” manuscript, the copy editor has his/her way with it. Then Mike read all 1300 pages, making sure that the copy editor didn’t change the meaning of anything. After that, the publisher moves everything from Word to Quark so that they have the control they need to produce photo-ready copy for the printer and sends us a set of PDFs.

With the PDFs in hand, we both read the ~1000 pages again (the move to Quark puts in the final styles), looking for things that got messed up during the move between software packages or new things that we notice. Theoretically, we’re only checking for formatting, but I always take this opportunity to read the entire book all the way through with fresh eyes (which is why I made Mike do the copy edits — so I had some time away from the book to get fresh again). That yielded about 50 pages of comments for the publisher to apply, including dropping about 5 pages of content that didn’t add enough value to be worth the space.

And then the iteration begins. We submitted 50 pages of comments on round 1, they provide round 2. We submitted 10 pages of comments on round 2, they provide round 3. Last night, we submitted about 4 comments, none of which would ever be noticed if they weren’t submitted. I asked for a round 4 (just ’cuz I’m anal), but for all intents and purposes, we’re done. And how do we party animals plan to celebrate? We’re taking 90 minutes for lunch. Off campus! : )

By the time all is said and done, not counting the front mater or the index, chapters 1-19 and appendices A-F will be 960 pages. It was about 1300, but we cut and we tightened up the styles to keep it to 3 digits while still covering roughly twice the technology (WinForms 2.0 is about twice as full-featured as WinForms 1.x). We were careful about not cutting anything useful, but we were ruthless about cutting stuff that didn’t meet the bar. Hopefully you’ll like the results.

Windows Forms 2.0 Programming is supposed to be printed the first week of May, so you should order yours today!

Believe it or not, Microsoft is always trying to improve its products and to do so, I find we do our best work when we actually ask our potential customers what they think.

In this case, I’d like to know what “pain points” you experience when configuring, deploying and maintaining distributed .NET applications. That can be any kind of app, whether it’s a client-side app that phones home for code or data updates or whether it’s a fully distributed grid or anything in between. Please be as specific as possible and, if you’d like one of our courteous technical people to follow-up, make sure to include contact info.

Use this as an opportunity to vent — don’t hold back. Remember: the life you save may be your own…

Genghis has been updated for .NET 2.0 and is available from the Genghis workspace. Enjoy.

Update: The following controls have been added to Genghis in the .NET 2.0 version:

• Dynamic Custom Button Control
• Data Interchange List Boxes
• File List Control
• Folder List Control
• Multi-Direction Progress bar
• Help Popup Control
• IP Address Control
• PictureBox Button Control
• TimeOut MessageBox Control
• Calendar Combo

I fell in love w/ the potential of monad a while ago w/ Jeffrey Snover’s original Channel9 video, but I was too lazy to download it onto all of my machines. However, after seeing Jeffrey’s talk at TechDays 2006 in Switzerland (and remembering that monad is installed by default w/ the WinFX SDK, so it was already on all my machines), I took the dive (starting with kiping Jeffrey’s personal copy of “Monad,” from ORA, Andy Oakley’s most excellent monad intro) and I’ve been doing it pretty much non-stop on the train and on the plane all the way home. Like Scott, I’m loving it.

I’ve built several scripts, including start-process (to act like cmd.exe’s “start” command — invoke-item doesn’t work on URLs), find-file, find-filebytext, find-dir and format-notepad. So far, no luck on format-clipboard, i.e. dropping the results of an operation into the clipboard, but I’m having a blast trying.

Monad is the command line I’ve missed so much from my ex-life under Unix. Give it a try! You’ll love it.

Hello from the fabulous Victoria-Jungrau Hotel in Interlaken, Switzerland, where Mel and I have just landed after three days in a much dinkier hotel in Rome (and although it was just a block away from the Vatican, I never ran into the pope at any of the local eateries or pubs…). I tried to post from the coin-operated Unix machine in our hotel basement last night, but the browser didn’t like the POST involved in adding new content to my site (or maybe it was the alt-shift-left knee to get the @ sign to appear on the Italian keyboard…).

This hotel room is nicer than our house, as evidenced by the fact that Mel made me take my jacket off the bed so that she could get “pristine” shots (including from an elevated position in the bathroom). They always treat us so well in Switzerland. Highly recommended.

This is my first real connected experience since boarding the plane Sunday morning (I don’t care how cool Outlook Web Access is – it ain’t nearly so cool as the Windows version), although I was able to get my cell phone to download my emails. I can’t image what that bill will be like…

When kids are young, they have no fear of computers or anything else. My eldest, when he was 2.5, knew how to detect what OS he was running (I dual booted Win2K and Win95 at the time), remember which OS his games needed, reboot, choose the non-default OS from the boot menu and start his app like it was the most natural thing in the world. Even though he couldn’t read, he learned all of the functionality of the app by choosing all of the menu items and pressing all of the toolbar icons just to see what they did. He had no fear.

Tonight, my youngest was working in Word, writing a paper that’s due tomorrow (of course). After he was finished digging through the thesaurus on the right-hand side, he wanted to close that part of the window, but accidental pressed the X to close the document he was working on (which, of course, he hadn’t saved). When he was asked if he was sure, he thought he was being asked if he was sure he wanted to close the thesaurus, so he pressed “Yes.”

The moment his document disappeared is when he learned to fear the power of the computer to throw away his work.

What did he do wrong? How do I explain it to him? What did we do wrong as an industry to teach my son to fear a tool meant to help?