Guest post by Rui Maximo: enjoy!

Good morning, everybody. It’s going to be 90 degrees in Seattle today, which RARELY happens in June, and I’ve already watered the tomato plants, which are beginning to look monstrous (finally!). Today we’re pleased to provide a guest post by one of the authors of Programming for Unified Communications with Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 (Microsoft Press, 2009; ISBN: 9780735626232; 416 pages). Rui describes the book’s approach and coverage and encourages your feedback. You can also find extended book excerpts here. Take it, Rui.

Rui here. We’re really excited to get a book out on Microsoft’s UC programming. We saw a void that needed to be filled to help independent software developers better understand the rich development platform offered by Office Communications Server and develop against it. The author team was assembled beginning of last year to deliver on that objective. We trashed a lot trying to figure out the best structure and content to cover because we knew we couldn’t cover all the APIs in the first edition. We hope you enjoy the format of this book. Instead of covering too much theory, we took the approach of jumping straight into coding examples and explaining the APIs as we went. If you’re like us, we figured you might get impatient and want to start coding right away. Consequently, the majority of the book is focused on short coding examples that you can follow to understand how the APIs work. You can fire up Visual Studio 2008 and start building great applications!

Talking about applications, as we brainstormed on possible scenarios to build sample code for, we realized there is a lot of opportunity for developers to write voice- and IM-enabled commercial applications. It’s like a gold mine for any developer with UC expertise. We’re excited about it, and we know more and more programmers will be attracted to this space. This edition is the first of many editions that targets explaining the Microsoft’s UC API. You can count on us to deliver on that vision. We look forward to hearing feedback from you on how we can improve this book.  Your feedback is VERY important to us. Do let us know your constructive feedback.

How can you provide your feedback, you ask? I’m glad you asked. There are a number of options. Follow https://twitter.com/DrRez. You can post suggestions and ask questions. He’s pretty sharp, and loves to see IT Pros and developers be successful deploying and developing with Office Communications Server. He represents the author group for both this book and the Office Communications Server 2007 R2 Resource Kit book. He’s also very responsive. Another option is to send feedback to Microsoft Press via https://twitter.com/MicrosoftPress, comments to this blog, or via MSPress’s books survey. It will get relayed to us.

We love this space because we really enjoy helping our readers better understand Office Communications Server. If you’re an expert in specific areas of Office Communications Server, please don’t hesitate to contact us. We’re always looking for great writers, contributors, and reviewers. Don’t be shy. We can use all the help we can get.  Hope you enjoy this book. We enjoyed writing it. Happy coding!

Tomorrow on the blog: MVP Mitch Tulloch and more on Windows 7!