Inside everybody there is one book. How about one article for the UK MSDN Flash?

The UK MSDN Flash contains within it a short technical article. The article has traditionally been written by employees of Microsoft in the UK. This has worked great but I think we can do even better. That "we" includes you! 

I want to widen the pool of potential authors from "Must be in Microsoft UK" to "Must be in the UK" :) My reasoning is pretty simple - I am convinced you will do a fabulous job of it. Some of the articles will continue to be written by my colleagues but my intent is that each article is considered on its own merits. My hope is that we will in time see a shift in the articles from  "Look at this new thing we have made" to  "This is important for you to know about based on my experiences with it". I want to use the Flash to show off the great talent and knowledge in the UK developer community I come across each and every day and share some of the learning and best practices more widely.

The most obvious question is "Eric, what topics do you want articles on?". The answer is surprisingly simple. "Topics which you think a lot of UK based developers using Microsoft technology would like to know something more about". Everything from Agile to Test Driven Development to Interop to Sharepoint Development to Encryption to Cloud Computing. I am pretty open to considering anything - but don't be offended if I say no :-)

Take a look at the following and if you are interested, drop me an email with a few sentences on the proposed article(s) and if possible a "sample of your work" e.g. a link to your blog. You can email me at eric DOT nelson AT microsoft.com

Some facts and figures:

  • We need 26 articles for a calendar year
  • I already have a backlog of 5 or so articles that takes us through to March - hence no time pressure :-) (Although a great article can trump those 5)
  • An article is 400 to 500 words long
  • Currently the article needs to be predominantly textual. It can not include pictures or diagrams or complex code indenting :-(
  • It can include a snippet or two of code
  • It can include links to more information
  • It can be complimented by a blog post by the author for further information, pretty pictures, diagrams etc.
  • The title of the article becomes the title of the Flash
  • You do not have to be great writer - but you do need to understand the topic well.

The following are links to the archives to give you an idea of past articles (Click on the link and then scroll to the bottom to see the article)

26 November 2008: Azure Services Platform

12 November 2008: PDC08 Highlights

29 October 2008: Non-Attributed Data Contracts in WCF

15 October 2008: Search is the portal

01 October 2008: Pex: Automated testing for .NET

17 September 2008: Writing a Search Provider

03 September 2008: Introducing the .NET Client Profile

20 August 2008: Introducing Zermatt

6 August 2008: Introducing Parallel Extensions to the .NET Framework

23 July 2008: UK Flash

9 July 2008: XNA Game Studio

25 June 2008: Have you ever wanted to program a robot?

11 June 2008: Do you think in Visual Basic?

28 May 2008: Do you worry about performance and scalability?

14 May 2008: The ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions Preview

30 April 2008: About Silverlight 2

16 April 2008: Getting Started with IronPython

2 April 2008: Introducing the ADO.NET Entity Framework

19 March 2008: ASP.NET Model View Controller (MVC) Framework

5 March 2008: Terminal Services Sessions: Then and Now

20 February 2008: Synchronization made Easy by the Sync Framework

6 February 2008: WMI Provider Extensions in .NET Framework v3.5

23 January 2008: The Integrated Pipeline in IIS7

9 January 2008: SharePoint Security without the Browser

12 December 2007: Silverlight Vista Gadgets

28 November 2007: SQL Server 2008

15 November 2007: What is new in BizTalk Server 2006 R2

31 October 2007: System.Core.dll of .NET Framework 3.5