I just submitted the final manuscript for Concurrent Programming on Windows to Addison-Wesley.

This marks the exciting transition from things happening on my timetable to things happening on AW’s timetable.

A lot has changed for me since I decided to write this book.  You might be surprised to hear that I actually signed the contract for it on November 29th, 2005.  That’s 2 years and 7 months ago.  It’s almost unbelievable that this book took so long to finish.  By comparison, my first one took just a little over a year.  The road has been a long one, full of personal ups and downs, but it’s no doubt been an exciting trip.

I’ve been at Microsoft the whole time.  At the outset, I was a PM on the CLR Team, hacking on software transactional memory and PLINQ as an evening activity.  Then I transitioned to doing it full time, but still as a PM.  Then I joined the Parallel Computing team as the dev for PLINQ.  Then I kicked off the whole Parallel Extensions effort (which is 20 members and growing strong), became the dev lead, and here I am today.  It’s pretty strange to say this, but without the book very little of that would have happened.  I can’t think of a better way to get entrenched in a technology, experience the breadth, and force yourself to learn every little intricate and often enlightening detail.  If you can afford the impact to mental health and personal relationships ;), it’s an activity I highly recommend to anybody wanting to master a technology...  not that one can actually master the concurrency beast, but y’know...

In retrospect, it should have taken a year.  Maybe next time.

The good news is that you will have the book in your hands soon.  (Well, if you decide to buy a copy, that is.)  If you manage to make it to my PDC 2008 pre-con session, I’m hoping we will have some copies available.  No promises, since I missed my final deadline by a couple weeks, but my fingers are crossed.

Oh yeah, and you can expect me to pick up blogging again now that I’ll have some free time.  Hmm, free time?  What will I do with myself!

Laissez les bon temps roulez!