It’s a Book!

As much as I like “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma”, it’s probably best not to let that gem at the bottom of my New and Improved: Now with Lab49! post remain unanswered for too long. The answer has nothing to do with family planning. Mom, don’t call. It’s not a baby.

It’s a book!

My proposal for Programming Distributed Applications (a working title) was accepted by the kind folks at Microsoft Press. The focus of the book is to show the mainstream .NET developer how to take advantage of current parallel-oriented hardware through distributed computing techniques (instead of multithreading, which in many ways can be much more difficult for the average developer). Rather than being a dry, academic focused treatise on the subject, it is a practical field-guide to recognizing, implementing, and tuning distributed applications using .NET within a largely enterprise context, subject to the peculiarities of that context (such as security, deployment, and administration). I develop a pedagogically-oriented distributed computing framework within the book as well as closely examine commercial off-the-shelf solutions such as Microsoft Compute Cluster Server and the Digipede Network.

The elevator pitch was to do for distributed applications what Petzold did for Windows applications. Big talk, of course, but that’s what elevator pitches are supposed to do…

With the hard work of book proposals and contract negotiations behind me, all that’s left to do is write the book. David Allen, may your GTD magic do its work.