The future of "C# in Depth"
I'm getting fairly frequent questions - mostly on Twitter - about whether there's going to be a third edition of C# in Depth. I figure it's worth answering it once in some detail rather than repeatedly in 140 characters ;)
I'm currently writing a couple of new chapters covering the new features in C# 5 - primarily async, of course. The current "plan" is that these will be added to the existing 2nd edition to create a 3rd edition. There will be minimal changes to the existing text of the 2nd edition - basically going over the errata and editing a few places which ought to mention C# 5 early. (In particular the changes to how foreach loop variables are captured.)
So there will definitely be new chapters. I'm hoping there'll be a full new print (and ebook of course) edition, but no contracts have been signed yet. I'm hoping that the new chapters will be provided free electronically to anyone who's already got the ebook of the 2nd edition - but we'll see. Oh, and I don't have any timelines at the moment. Work is more demanding than it was when I was writing the first and second editions, but obviously I'll try to get the job done at a reasonable pace. (Writing about async in a way which is both accessible and accurate is really tricky, by the way.)
Of course when I've finished those, I've got two other C# books I want to be writing... when I'm not working on Noda Time, Tekpub screencasts etc...
Update
I had a question on Twitter around the "two other C# books". I don't want to go into too many details - partly because they're very likely to change - but my intention is to write "C# from Scratch" and "C# in Style". The first would be for complete beginners; the second wouldn't go into "how things work" so much as "how to use the language most effectively." (Yes, competition for Effective C#.) One possibility is that both would be donationware, at least in ebook form, ideally with community involvement in terms of public comments.
I'm hoping that both will use the same codebase as an extended example, where "From Scratch" would explain what the code does, and "In Style" would explain why I chose that approach. Oh, and "From Scratch" would use unit testing as a teaching tool wherever possible, attempting to convey the idea that it's something every self-respecting dev does :)