Getting beyond public sources...

I had a decent talk together that people seemed to like, but that was only an hour or so of material. Not exactly book-worthy. And while I'm convincing as a speaker, it doesn't mean that everything is correct. If I wanted to dig deeper into the story, I needed to do research. I tend to approach things as an engineer, which is to say, I look for show-stoppers. What could happen that would make it impossible to create this book? In terms of research, that meant to me that I needed a list of people that I had to have onboard to make this story legitimate. From my original talk, I broke down .NET into three topic areas:

• The Common Language Runtime, which I originally put the face of Jason Zander on, although it was actually Brian Harry that led the original version (Zander took over for version 2)
• The .NET Languages, specifically C#, which meant Anders Hejlsberg
• The web elements, led by Scott Guthrie

So that was who I reached out to first. Being the .NET Rocks guy has its advantages, I had some confidence that I could get a response from Guthrie, Zander, Harry and Hejlsberg - even if that response was "I don't think this is a good idea." In short order (I think Scott Guthrie responded the fastest!) they all liked the idea, and were happy to make time for me to interview them. By the fall of 2017, I started the first interviews.