ASP.NET MVC Has Changed My Life

Lately I have been neglecting my blog and not posting as often as I would have liked.  I have had some very exciting things start up, at the begining of the summer, in my life that 6 months ago I would have said "no way is that going to happen."  These new adventures are the growing popularity of my blog, public speaking engagements, and a new book I was asked to write on ASP.NET MVC. Many of you picked up on the fact that I was writing a book based on my profile on the Philly.NET website, but I had officially announced it until this post.  Many of my friends and family don't even known I am writing a book so feel lucky in knowning you guys are some of the first people to know.

As you can imagine writing a book is about the same as writing a detailed blog post only 10,000% harder, because a two page post now needs to be extended out in to a 600 page book that needs to flow just as easily as the 2 page post did.  Luckily for me my best friend, Al Katawazi who I have known since 9th grade, is also a pretty decent programmer from the Rochester, NY area and he agreed to help me get this book out the door by the end of the year to align with the ASP.NET MVC release.

The book is titled ASP.NET MVC Website Programming: Problem - Design - Solution, and can currently be found at the following places for pre-order:

Sorry about the lack of a book picture, I haven't had the time to go out and get a professional photo taken of me for the cover.  That will be coming pretty soon.

The current description of the book according to the Wiley site is, which also pretty well sums up the book as a whole in my opinion:

The utility of this book will be a nuts and bolts how-to guide on creating a website using MVC.  It will solve some of the most common problems that programmers run into when creating their first application or when trying to upgrade a current application to this new technology. The book, much like the first one, will break each section down into 3 parts: the Problem, the Design, and the Solution.  For the most part, the chapter outline will be mostly the same, because the majority of the chapters are still just as important now to web developers as they were when the book was originally written. However, this edition includes MVC updates within these chapters. Some of the site features covered in the book and provided in the TheBeerHouse example/framework code are:
  • registration and membership system and user-selectable themes
  • content management system for articles and photos
  • polls, mailing lists, and forums
  • e-commerce store, shopping cart, order management with real-time credit-card processing
  • localization
In building and working with these features the site developer will learn:
  • Master pages, themes, membership, and profiles
  • Server-side UI controls
  • Compilation, deployment, instrumentation, error handling and logging
  • Data access
  • The MVC (model view controller) approach to separation of the site UI and presentation layer from the pluggable data access layer and business logic layer

The code for the book will be published to CodePlex probably this weekend, that is if you want a sneak peak at what has taken me away from posting on my blog for the past couple of months.

http://www.codeplex.com/TheBeerHouse

If you want to wait for the book I totally understand, because who wants to spoil Christmas by peaking at the presents.  I am just kidding, I don't think my code can be compared to Christmas morning, but maybe the 3rd Tuesday morning of October.

All kidding aside I really have to thank Scott Guthrie, Phil Haack and the whole ASP.NET MVC, because with out the great support for this product and the fore sight of Microsoft to actually create a product that ALT.NET developers like my self have been crying out for. I wouldn't be in this place in my life.  I never thought that an interest in a small alpha release of a product back in December 2007 would lead me to writing a book, but it has been a great ride and I only hope it continues.

I am going to continue to try and post content that is useful to other developers like myself as much as I can, but please bear with me until the end of the year when all my chapters will be written and the book will be getting ready for the presses.

Nick Berardi

In charge of Cloud Drive Desktop at @Amazon, Entrepreneur, Microsoft MVP, ASPInsider, co-founder and CTO of @CaddioApp, Father, and @SeriouslyOpen host