This evening I received a reply to an email that I wrote 16 months ago!

In January 2003, I sent the following email to my user group:

Folks, go check out: http://www.crystalreportsbook.com

Basically the story goes that this book was written for APress and then the contract was cancelled due to a lack of .Net book sales. Too bad. Maybe O’Reilly can print it under their “Missing Manuals” category…

So, anyway, here is the link.

I suggest that the first thing to check out is the FAQ’s! Then take a look at the chapters online – for free, until a publisher is found.

I have put this link on our website as well.

Now if *I* were to write a book on Crystal Reports, it would probably look something like this:

“I love it I hate it I love it I hate it I can’t live with it I can’t live without it I love it I hate it I love it I hate it I can’t live with it I can’t live wi…”

I had cc’d the author, Brian Bischof on this email.

Tonight he emailed me back to say that the book, Crystal Reports .NET Programming, has been published and includes much of the feedback he has recieved in the past year and a half.

Brian – Congratulations and thank you for your perseverence!

I swear, I really am coding these days, but it’s nothing new. Just getting ready to crank out the puzzle pieces of a pluggable framework I devised for my client. It will handle possibly hundreds of different data entry forms for the various testing services they perform for their clients. The app leverages a boat load of .Net framework technologies and has been a blast to architect. I know that sounds so generic that I could be completely bullshitting, but most of what I have done for it is written about in a LOT of previous posts.