Dave Donaldson

Article Done, Off to Editing

Thursday, March 04 2004

Well, the article is done. It was a tight two weeks, and I didn’t spend much time with the family, but it’s over with. I estimated 4000 words and that’s almost exactly what it ended up at. Overall, it was an interesting exercise because neither one of us has done anything before like this under that tight of a deadline. I’ve been published before, but only online and only once (on VB2TheMax, now located here), and I think Steve was a technical reviewer for a book a couple years ago. But it was worth it because we really wanted to make sure we were included in the special ASP.NET 2.0 issue in June, and barring any unforeseen problems, we’ve assured ourselves of just that.

The article is basically divided into two sections: the first being a detailed look at the new navigation controls in ASP.NET Whidbey, and the second part is us demonstrating how to implement one of those controls, the breadcrumb (SiteMapPath in Whidbey), using today’s ASP.NET. All along, we knew the second part would be the hardest and that turned out to be true. We hit a couple snags when implementing the breadcrumb control, but fortunately got the kinks worked out. I’ll leave the rest of the details for you to read when it’s published, so be sure to look for it in May.

Fanboy moment: I was catching up on Chris Sells’ blog the other day and saw where he is writing an upcoming MSDN Mag article about WinForms in Whidbey. So I emailed him (not that he has any idea who I am) and asked if he was also going to be in the June issue, for which he thought so. I must say, getting published in MSDN Mag is pretty sweet, but being in the same issue and having our names on the cover (I presume) with Chris’s is one of the coolest things ever.

Update: Chris' article was published in May, but not to fret: we're on the cover with Jeff Prosise, Keith Brown, Dino Esposito, Fritz Onion, and Steven Smith. The only oddball in the whole group is us :-)