The Book! Finally Out!

I just have to brag about this one! I have been contributing articles for the Windows Developer Power Tools book. The book project has been lead by Jim Holmes and James Avery and I have been brought in by Mr. Holmes. I started writing my first article some time in January last year (if I remember correctly), and I am now extremely glad that the wait is over and I can see my work being published.

The book is a collection of articles and recipes about using 170+ free and open-source tools that can boost your developer productivity on any Windows and .NET project. I am sure that even knowing about those tools' existence will help each and every programmer out there with his/her career.

I have contributed a total of three articles (listed in the order of their writing):

• Eliminating Memory Leaks in Internet Explorer with Drip -- the first article. This is the piece of work that made me dig deeper into the dreaded memory leak problem under that browser. Writing this article has meant so much for me: I contacted Matthias Miller, a really nice person, a very gifted programmer, and the maintainer of the Drip project; I got to learn a lot of stuff about the memory leaks problem under IE and managed to improve a lot of our ASP.NET products; I even registered as a developer on the Drip open source project (even if I did not find the time to contribute that much to the project)
• Building Sophisticated AJAX Applications with ASP.NET’s Atlas -- the article is a bit outdated right now as it is based on the MS AJAX (formerly known as Atlas) CTP's and the product has changed a lot since the first beta release. Anyway the info there is still useful as an introduction to the spirit of the framework.
• PowerShell – a New Generation Command Line and Scripting Tool -- my favorite! PowerShell is a really nice addition to the Windows toolbox and every person can benefit from knowing it. The shell combines the power of the traditional UNIX shells with a full-fledged programming language that gives you access to virtually any object on your system: WMI, COM, .NET, you name it. cmd.exe is dead, long live PowerShell.

You can look at the table of contents and read the sample chapters online. Jim, thank you for bringing me aboard! I enjoyed the project and I would do it again any day.

UPDATE: fixed a sexist-sounding part born by the part of my brain that does its thinking in Bulgarian