There are a couple of Amazon reviews of Beginning ASP.NET 1.1 querying the use of Web Matrix as the tool in the book. I thought I'd use that as an excuse to explain some of the choices we have to make when writing books
The issue of the development tool was a tough one for us, that perhaps in hindsight we didn't get quite right. I quite freely accept that the cover doesn't explain the tool usage - we're talking with Wrox to see if this can be rectified when the book is reprinted. The reason we picked Web matrix was simply price; it's freely available. We took the view that people wouldn't want to buy, or might not be able to afford, any edition of Visual Studio. For a tool as powerful as VS.NET $100 is great value, but it's still $100. There are many people to whom that's not a justifiable expense. Web Matrix is an excellent tool. Visual Studio also use a different programming model (code behind) by default - in fact I think its support for code-inline is actually quite poor, something which can cause more confusion.
So, what should we have done? Perhaps at the beginning of the book we should have explained the tools, the differences between them and shown how building ASP.NET pages worked in them. We could then have kept the rest of the book fairly tool agnostic. Screenshots could perhaps have been marked to indicate the tool in use, maybe showing the different tools if one provided a feature that is worth highlighting. This would have to be done very carefully, as multiple screenshots showing different tools for essentially the same task breaks up what's being shown. If you've only got one tool then extra screenshots are annoying (hence the idea of doing all that at the beginning).
We're going to look into this as a project for when we do a beginning book targetted at ASP.NET 2.0.
We've had similar complaints over the years regarding the use of langauge. That isn't an issue with this book as it's VB specific, but things like Professional ASP.NET however need to cover both languages. The general view is that C# programmers can read VB code more easily than VB programmers can read C#. It's a fairly sweeping statement, and obviously isn't 100% accurate, but what can we do? We can't put samples in both langauges as the book would be twice the size (and cost - there are also physical limitations on book binding), and the book would just feel really fragmented. So we mostly used VB and sometimes C#. For the downloadable samples there are two complete code trees - VB and C# (or will be when I get time to finish them).
Views on these topics welcome. What do you feel about the tool usage? Should there be more VS.NET usage in books?