Microsoft folks have released a large collection of free eBooks including Visual Studio, WP, Win 8, Office 365, SQL, Azure, CRM, etc. You can get more details from the following two posts where not only you can browse the catalogue but also download them.
Happy Leeching!
Read this story in the Guardian about a guy called Matt, who blogged about bringing up his daughter all alone, as his wife died soon after giving birth. This was such a heart stopping story, which is highly recommended. Interesting shift on the tone of the blog which first helped Matt with the bereavement and later gave him strength to cope with this to finally the blog providing support for others in a similar boat and looking for help.
If you get teary-eyed then you probably don’t want to read this, but I would recommend the article. Matt has just released a book called Two Kisses for Maddy as well.
Microsoft is giving away a free eBook on SQL Server 2008 R2 for free. It gives you insight into exciting new implementations in the DB such as complex event processing (CEP) and StreamInsight. You can check out the Table of Contents here and download the book in either pdf format or xps format.
My Book on WCF is now available on Google Books – perfect for those of you who don't want to buy the book to support a few starving authors 
.
My article on P2P programming with WCF and .NET v3.5 was finally published on MSDN. This was written a few months ago and has been going through the internal process at MS to get published- finally it is up there – better late than never I guess. 
I discuss the new features for P2P programming in WCF and .NET 3.5 and how things have moved up the stack in being a first class managed citizen now as opposed to you. Although the code was build and run on Vista you can run most of it on XP; however some elements such as PNM, Contacts and Collaboration are Vista specific.
Interestingly, you cannot download the source code for the samples and the small app that I had written – you can see the screen shots and the code snipped. If you need the complete solution let me know.
You can download the first chapter for free from Addison-Wesley's intro book on DSL. If you are new to DSL's (Domain Specific Language) this this is a good read. Here is a abstract from the publisher:
Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs)–languages geared to specific vertical or horizontal areas of interest–are generating growing excitement from software engineers and architects. DSLs bring new agility to the creation and evolution of software, allowing selected design aspects to be expressed in terms much closer to the system requirements than standard program code, significantly reducing development costs in large-scale projects and product lines. In this breakthrough book, four leading experts reveal exactly how DSLs work, and how you can make the most of them in your environment.
With Domain-Specific Development with Visual Studio DSL Tools, you'll begin by mastering DSL concepts and techniques that apply to all platforms. Next, you'll discover how to create and use DSLs with the powerful new Microsoft DSL Tools–a toolset designed by this book's authors. Learn how the DSL Tools integrate into Visual Studio–and how to define DSLs and generate Visual Designers using Visual Studio's built-in modeling technology.
One of the MSDN Webcasts that I along with Shawn, Dennis, and Chris did on the following topics with some samples from the WCF Pro book. This is a Level 300 Webcast, and there is a lot of material to cover! If you would like us to do a Webcast on any specific topic from WCF let us know – we will see what we can do.
If you are interested you can see the recording for this session.
The first of three articles entitled “Hosting and Consuming WCF Services” which is essentially one of the chapters from the book is now published on MSDN at the .NET home page. The article directly can be found via this link. The other two should follow soon. Excellent job guys!
APress, the publisher of my book entitled “Pro WCF: Practical Microsoft SOA Implementation” is giving away the first Chapter for free – you can get it from here. The table of contents is also published and can be downloaded from here.
Dennis earlier was responsible for collating the code from us for the book, and he just informed us it is available online! Sweet! You can get the code from here and have a play. You will of course need .NET 3.0 RTM and preferably Visual Studio 2005.
It is good to see some reviews starting to come along, if you have any questions feel free to ping any of us and also let us know if you find any issues with the code – or the book if you need some help.
Don’t forget you can submit the errata here and see the Table of Contents here. 
I think the WCF Book that I recently finished is out earlier than a week and should be available on Jan 15th instead of the 22nd, however Amazon still shows the availability of Jan 22nd.
A number of you have pinged me asking the Table of Contents (TOC) for the Book that I recently finished. I don’t know why it does not show up on Amazon or even on the publishers site, but here are a high level TOC. If you want the detailed TOC’s then let me know and I can dig those out as well.
PART 1 Introducing Windows Communication Foundation
CHAPTER 1 Introducing Service-Oriented Architecture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
CHAPTER 2 Introducing WCF Basics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
CHAPTER 3 Exploring the WCF Programming Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
PART 2 Programming with WCF
CHAPTER 4 Installing and Creating WCF Services . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99
CHAPTER 5 Hosting and Consuming WCF Services . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145
CHAPTER 6 Managing WCF Services . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179
PART 3 Advanced Topics in WCF
CHAPTER 7 Implementing WCF Security . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213
CHAPTER 8 Implementing Reliable Messaging and Queue-Based Communications . . . . . . . 249
CHAPTER 9 Using Transactions in WCF . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 277
CHAPTER 10 Integrating with COM+ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 301
CHAPTER 11 Working with Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 335
CHAPTER 12 Developing Peer-to-Peer Applications with WCF . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 371
CHAPTER 13 Implementing SOA Interoperability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 401
PART 4 Appendixes
APPENDIX A QuickReturns Ltd. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 425
APPENDIX B History of Microsoft Web Service Implementations . . . . . . . . . . . . 431
APPENDIX C WCF and .NET Framework Installation Steps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 441
As some of you are aware the book I was writing titled 
Pro WCF: Practical Microsoft SOA Implementation is finally finished – w00t! It is right now being set and indexed and it will be off to the press in about three weeks or so. This is published by APress and it should be available by January 22nd – a little longer than usual because of the holiday season.
It sure has been a very interesting experience for me. Hopefully it would be as useful for you. I hopefully will be able to take out some time to talk a little more about it here in the near future – all depends on how much time I can take out.
NeoSmart highlights about the fact that there is a possibility that .NET 3.0 might RTM in a couple of months. What would this mean? Well a couple of things. One, hopefully MS has gotten their act together and stop making huge breaking changes in every public drop. While I understand that every CTP is still early in beta and with the nature of these things there will be changes, but you should see the number of breaking changes that are being made so late in the game. And the changes are not small, but classes, methods, parameters, etc. being changed, moved, renamed, etc. Which makes all this quite irritating – and it seems quite similar to experiences shared with a few other colleagues of mine had with VSTS and Team Foundation Server. And two, hopefully there would be documentation! Currently, one of the chapters for the WCF book I am writing is on Peer-2–Peer networking and there is almost no information publicly available! Which as you can imagine makes life a bit interesting, though reflector is your friend in such situations.
So, lets ignore the .NET 3.0 naming stupidity, and keep our fingers crossed that they get this right – though I am very skeptical.
You probably know that I am co-authoring a book along with a few other fellow Avanader’s and ex-Avanader’s who I call the Indigo Amigos. Who are these crazy people you ask? Brave enough to hang out with me. In addition to reading their names on APress or Amazon, but here are the links to their blogs/sites in ascending order:
I wanted to find out if anyone out there has read The Connection Machine – which essentially is a PhD thesis of the author's (W. Danny Hillis) and seems to be something I would be interested in. The question I have is, has anyone read it and if so what do they think of it? And if you have it, can I borrow it to read it?
