It’s taken a little while to write this, but I’m happy to say that I’ve been offered and accepted the job of editor at DeveloperFusion. My new role will be to commission, edit and write new weekly – perhaps twice weekly if all goes well - articles for the site to go along with the news and roundups that are already put out frequently. Initially, I’ll be concentrating on .NET development topics as that’s what I know, but shortly I’ll be looking for articles and authors on many more topics – Apple, Ruby, Python, Perl, Architecture, Databases, Java and more.

I’ve already released two articles which you may be interested in:

• Introduction to Windows Azure – What you should know by Neil Mackenzie
• How to migrate your ASP.NET site to the Azure cloud by Richard Parker (@rikp)

These are the first two of a series of articles on Azure coming out in the next few weeks. We’ll also have some Windows Phone 7 stuff, F#, and a good helping of ASP.NET as well. Keep tuned to @developerFusion on Twitter and the article feed to keep pace with new articles as they are released.

We Need You

Of course, it goes without saying that we need your help to keep DeveloperFusion going.

If you’re a writer, experienced or wanting to write your first article, please get in touch and let me know. All the articles we publish are reviewed and edited before release so you’ll get some good feedback on your writing style, content and coding in return, as well as exposure to some 50,000 users who subscribe to our newsletter plus many more who come visiting in through the front door. And if you’d like to write but haven’t any preconceived ideas as to what to write about, we can help you with that too.

If you’d like to help but don’t want to write, perhaps you’d care to review an article or two for us. No matter your knowledge level, there’s likely to be something in the pipeline which your help will make better. You might be able to improve a writer’s code or say whether or not their article succeeds as a tutorial from your point of view as beginner yourself. Those who can, do, as they say.

Either way, please do get in touch. The email address is hello@developerfusion.com. I look forward to hearing from you.

The interesting thing about writing a book such as Programming ASP.NET 3.5 is that as new readers come to it over time, they find that libraries used within the book code break the examples. Peter Ormshaw got in touch today to point out that the Ajax Control Toolkit has changed slightly since build 20229 which the book was built against.

In particular, he’s come across three differences between the book and working with v3.5.40412 which is the latest version at the moment.

Installing The Control Toolkit

Appendix A, which covers installing the control toolkit is now obsolete. Best practice now would be to download the binaries for the toolkit and follow the installation instructions at http://www.asp.net/ajaxlibrary/act.ashx.

You Must Use The Toolkit Script Manager

Any AJAX web form you’ve created in Visual Studio automatically contains the standard ASP.NET ScriptManager control. If you want to use any toolkit controls on that page, you must replace this with the toolkit’s own ScriptManager control. So then, you change this

<asp:ScriptManager ID="ScriptManager1" runat="server" />

to this

<asp:ToolkitScriptManager ID="ToolkitScriptManager1" runat="server">
</asp:ToolkitScriptManager>

Toolkit now uses asp as its TagPrefix: BulletedList Users Beware!

The final thing to note is that v40412 now has the Toolkit controls use “asp” as the default TagPrefix for its controls rather than cc1. This in itself is not a problem and makes sense as Microsoft have now more formally adopted the Toolkit with all its jQuery finery and finessing on the client side.

However, the toolkit also includes a control called BulletedList which, with the tagprefix change now means that Visual Studio will no longer compile pages referencing the toolkit and containing this control until you alter the TagPrefix used by the toolkit on that page. Typically, that means changing the “asp” in TagPrefix=”asp” in this line

<%@ Register Assembly="AjaxControlToolkit" Namespace="AjaxControlToolkit" TagPrefix="asp" %>

to something other than asp. Don Kiely has a full description and reasoning behind this issue at devproconnections.com.

8000 words into the new book and then my mind turned left…

They say that a year in internet terms is equivalent to three or so in our own. The speed with which the web development tools we use continue to change and improve remains consistently high despite the fact that in internet terms, the web is now in its fifties. ASP.NET development too has reached its mid-life crisis, swapping the classic postback estate car for the sportier Web 2.0, AJAX-enabled asynchronous model, dallying with coquettish client-side javascript libraries and yet still relying on the server-side framework to do all the chores that are taken for granted while it remains ignorant of those interactions on the browser. Some homely webforms with the extra slice of viewstate on their pages have been divorced in favour of the slimmer, higher maintenance MVC models, while CSS fashion gurus tell us that this year's little black dress is increased web standards compliance (when is it not?) with a dash of HTML 5 and a soupcon of CSS 3, accessorized with a little Silverlight bling and social network integration.

As a writer, this pisses me off. Someone scraped the contents of Darren Di Lieto’s website and published it
into a 350-page book being sold online for $100. Publishers have faked their details, resellers refuse to pull the book.

Please spread the word about this and help alert people that they should not buy this book.

Well, tech books anyway. Charles Petzold has written an excellent post on the state (and the point) of being a technical book author in response to Jeff Atwood’s own post on how he found writing his first book now that it has found its way to the shops.

And Charles has it pretty much spot on vis a vis the experience and the rewards of producing a 700+ page book. And the comments to the post are pretty much in two camps : ‘I chose to write a blog’ and ‘why don’t you self-publish?’ Ironically, Charles is probably one of the few technical authors who could go the way of lulu.com or Amazon’s createspace.com because he is well known enough to have knowledge of his book spread by word of mouth. Others would include Don Box, Scott Guthrie (if he ever chose to write one), and Bill Joy. Perhaps Miguel d’Icaza. The self-publishing route is double-edged. If you do go that way, you get no advance up front but you do get a higher return per book (with some payment to the printer pay book depending on the company you've gone with). It’s also true that post-publication, a self-published book will require more support and PR effort from you to get people to buy it.

As someone who’s now 200 pages into his 13th book, writing it in the wee small hours with support from Red Bull, I’d add two more brief points to Charles’ words on writing. You Write Books Because That’s What You Like To Do. Writing a book makes you learn and relearn your subject. Which is also good.