Pre-order on Amazon: Developing Service-Oriented AJAX Applications on the Microsoft® Platform

For all the AJAX and ASP.NET fans out there I wanted to point out the upcoming book by Daniel Larson (SharePoint MVP). Daniel has an impressive knowledge about what's going on in .Net 3.5 and the coming SP1. The book will guide intermediate as well as advanced developers in the ASP.NET AJAX inroads. I already had a glimpse at some of the chapters and they are impressive and easy to comprehend.

The first to send proof of pre-order purchase, will receive a free book with Daniel's signature!

Developing Service-Oriented AJAX Applications on the Microsoft® Platform (PRO-Developer) by Daniel Larson The book is available for pre-order on Amazon.

Cannot wait to see this one in print!

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Excellent introduction to Silverlight

This is an excellent book for developers starting to get more involved in Silverlight. I already had some exposure to Silverlight from presentations, demos and screen casts, and this book helped me get the bigger picture of Silverlight by describing from A-Z the essential components and techniques of this RIA platform. Even though it is dedicated to Silverlight 1.0 IMO about 80% of the book is applicable to the second beta of the platform. The XAML chapters worked for me on Silverlight 2 Beta and with some patience I was able to translate most of the JavaScript code samples to it's C# equivalent.

The book contains detailed information about all moving parts in Silverlight. Without being a boring reference book the content is presented in clean technical language with good examples. The code can be downloaded from the site of the publisher, but for the XAML part I preferred to type it myself using IntelliSense, so I can play with different options.

I particularly like how the author presents functionally similar components, such as transformations, brushes or animations, starting with the simplest variation and building up to the most complex. This not only shows the logical gradation in their functionality, but helps the developer to find optimal control for a given task.

The author frequently points out the difference between WPF, Silverlight 1 and 2, which helps to distinguish between seemingly similar features in all of these three presentation foundation flavors.

The color print was a pleasant surprise and certainly makes the content easier to comprehend. The color also helps to better demonstrate some of the more compelling visual effects in Silverlight.

Since the author, Adam Nathan, is a Microsoft developer on the Silverlight team, I really hope that he'll write a second edition of this book updated for Silverlight 2.

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ISBN: 0672330075
ISBN-13: 9780672330070

Comprehensive guide for MS Office and SharePoint integration developers

The book Pro SharePoint solution Development, Combining .Net, SharePoint, and Office 2007 written by Microsoft insiders Ed Hill, Susie Adams is an indebt review of how to utilize SharePoint in the Microsoft Office ecosystem. This book from the Pro series of Apress delivers a variety of advanced examples, richly illustrated with sample code, downloadable from Apress, and step by step instructions and illustrations in the book itself. The organization of the book is very convenient and the first four chapters allow the reader to brush up his knowledge about MS Offices and SharePoint with abundant external links. Each consecutive chapter after that represents a standalone example based on a simplified real-world scenario. The examples are focused on the integration with a particular MS Office product. For example Chapter 5 demonstrates a scenario where MS Word integrates with SharePoint and Chapter 9 shows how to construct PowerPoint slides using content stored in a SharePoint list. Every example starts with an introduction and walkthrough, which allows the reader to start reading the chapter directly without losing context.

The complexity of integrating products of the MS Office family in enterprise solutions requires quite a bit of knowledge and experience thus I do not recommend this book to beginners in SharePoint and MS Office programming. While this book has a plenty of introductory and historical information about MS Office development and SharePoint customization, it does not emphasize on important steps of professional SharePoint development such as creation of SharePoint solutions, list and site template customization and provisioning. However if you are already familiar with SharePoint (WSS 3, MOSS 2007) concepts such as solutions, features, workflow etc., this is the book to put all these features in the context of enterprise applications. Since I started working on an integration project with MS Office and SharePoint at the time I was reading the book, I took away plenty of ideas to use in my project.

The software and hardware requirements for the examples in this book are quite high, so if you want to be able to implement them on your own you need to allocate some time to prepare a system with MOSS 2007, MS Office 2007 Enterprise, VS 2008 Professional or Team Edition and for the first example MS Office 2003. In addition there are several manual actions, which require a bit more time. Something, which may not be obvious from the title, is the heavy use of the new MS Office document standard - Office Open XML (commonly referred to as OOXML or OpenXML). This was my first exposure to this format specification and I found its use throughout the book very useful.

Overall this book is of great value to intermediate and advanced developers, working on enterprise applications based on the MS Office system or integration projects with third party vendors. The examples can be read independently and each one of them not only demonstrates the implementation of a particular scenario, but also provokes ideas for other projects.

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1590598083, 978-1590598085