Monthly Archives: August 2012

General, Stack Overflow

Stack Overflow and personal emails

80 Comments

This post is partly meant to be a general announcement, and partly meant to be something I can point people at in the future (rather than writing a short version of this on each email).

These days, I get at least a few emails practically every day along the lines of:

“I saw you on Stack Overflow, and would like you to answer this development question for me…”

It’s clear that the author:

  • Is aware of Stack Overflow
  • Is aware that Stack Overflow is a site for development Q&A
  • Is aware that I answer questions on Stack Overflow

… and yet they believe that the right way of getting me to answer a question is by emailing it to me directly. Sometimes it’s a link to a Stack Overflow question, sometimes it’s the question asked directly in email.

In the early days of Stack Overflow, this wasn’t too bad. I’d get maybe one email like this a week. Nowadays, it’s simply too much.

If you have a question worthy of Stack Overflow, ask it on Stack Overflow. If you’ve been banned from asking questions due to asking too many low-quality ones before, then I’m unlikely to enjoy answering your questions by email – learn what makes a good question instead, and edit your existing questions.

If you’ve already asked the question on Stack Overflow, you should consider why you think it’s more worthy of my attention than everyone else’s questions. You should also consider what would happen if everyone who would like me to answer a question decided to email me.

Of course in some cases it’s appropriate. If you’ve already asked a question, written it as well as you can, waited a while to see if you get any answers naturally, and if it’s in an area that you know I’m particularly experienced in (read: the C# language, basically) then that’s fine. If your question is about something from C# in Depth – a snippet which doesn’t work or some text you don’t understand, for example – then it’s entirely appropriate to mail me directly.

Basically, ask yourself whether you think I will actually welcome the email. Is it about something you know I’m specifically interested in? Or are you just trying to get more attention to a question, somewhat like jumping a queue?

I’m aware that it’s possible this post makes me look either like a grumpy curmudgeon or (worse) like an egocentric pseudo-celebrity. The truth is I’m just like everyone else, with very little time on my hands – time I’d like to spend as usefully and fairly as possible.

Books, C#, C# 5

The future of “C# in Depth”

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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 :)