First draft of the book "Understanding Windows CardSpace" available on Rough Cuts

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Ah finally. I waited for this moment a looong time :-) the first draft of "Understanding Windows CardSpace" is available in prerelease online, on Safari Rough Cuts. More details below.

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It's already few weeks that our book, "Understanding Windows CardSpace", showed up on Amazon and in the in-store kiosks at Borders. It's really an emotion to make an ego search and find a book that you wrote, as opposed to books in which you are acknowledged (which BTW is always VERY nice! Thanks to the authors of "Writing Secure Code for Windows Vista™","Web Services Architecture and Its Specifications: Essentials for Understanding WS-*","Web Service Security","Windows Communication Foundation Unleashed" and "Microsoft® Windows® Communication Foundation Hands-on! Beta Edition" for mentioning me).

The manuscript is finally in a shape that allows to give a good idea of what the final book will look like: and while it's true that many figures are still the sketches I made on my tablet, if you are a regular reader of this blog you are definitely used to the style... Hence, we published the manuscript in its current form on Rough Cuts. Rough Cuts is a great service provided by Safari, that can be accessed even if you are not a safari subscriber. In their own words:

Sometimes you just can't wait for the book. When you need to gain early access to information on cutting-edge technologies, turn to the Rough Cuts service from Safari Books Online. With the Rough Cuts service, you'll access books as they are being written. You can choose to purchase electronic access to the title with unlimited viewing and PDF downloads of each revision, pre-purchase the print book, or get the best of both worlds - electronic access immediately and the print book later. Any way you cut it, you will receive the finished product when it is published.

That's really the perfect tool for making this available while we go through the last phases of the publishing process.

About that: let me tell you that the team at Addison Wesley is nothing short of amazing. They are real professionals, who are smoothly leading us through the publishing process no matter how much we try to make their life difficult. Trust me, I can't give you the details but there are times in which we make their life REALLY difficult: yet everything magically works out. If I'll ever write another book, I hope I'll have the chance of writing it with them!

While I write this post the pile of tasks I have to get done by this afternoon is growing, so I better get back to work. I'll give more details about the book structure in some other post: for the time being, I invite you to check out the preface, which should be freely accessible in the preview pages.

Ah, one last thing: the book's foreword is being written by a very special person, and we are extremely honored & grateful for this. But we won't say anything further for the time being... <suspenseful_music />  ;-)