I’m looking at how to provide information around .NET 4, Silverlight 4 and CSLA 4.

It is a challenging consideration. Many people like books, and I do to. I could create an Expert 2010 Business Objects book, which would take around 6 months. That means it would be out just about in time for Silverlight 5 to ship. Given the rate of Silverlight releases, conventional books (at least of the ~750 page variety) are too slow.

A lot of people have found my PDF ebooks to be very useful. Each one was around ~140 pages, and there’s no print/shipping/production time. This means they come out much faster – but they are still essentially static content once published, just like a conventional book.

The Silverlight and Core 3.8 video series have also been very popular. Not everyone likes to read, and there’s some real value in watching how things are done in a more dynamic manner. Also, videos take less time to produce than either an ebook or conventional book, so they are potentially more responsive. On the other hand, some people really dislike video content and prefer books.

I think it is safe to say that I’ll continue to produce video content, as that addresses an important set of users and is relatively fast to produce.

But I also think text content is important. It has a different price point, and offers advantages around consumption that just aren’t there with videos.

So the question is how to make text content timely, and at least a little less static – while still recognizing the realities of the amount of work involved.

Most conventional publishers now offer a “beta program” of some sort for their books. Basically you buy the book before it exists, and you get access to draft copies of chapters as they arrive. Once the chapters go through the edit process, you then get access to the final versions.

I’m thinking about doing something along that line for CSLA 4. Create ebook content, perhaps with each chapter as a separate PDF. Put this content on http://download.lhotka.net like I do with the videos, and then refresh the PDF files as they go through the revision process.

To be clear, this would be the “How to Use CSLA 4” book, not the “How to Build a .NET Framework” book. The focus would be on using the various features of CSLA to construct a reusable business layer, and how to use the data portal to achieve flexible n-tier deployment and scalability. Nor would it dive into specific UI technologies – I’d do separate ebooks for those.

Basically it will be like the Core 3.8 video series, but in ebook form, and targeting CSLA 4 of course.

Thoughts?