For those of you in the Washington DC area, my co-author Andy Glover and I will be doing a book signing for Continuous Integration on Thursday, August 30th, 2007 at the Reston Barnes and Noble bookstore. Here are the details:

Barnes & Noble
Thursday, August 30th @ 7:30pm
1851 Fountain Dr
Reston, VA 20190
703-437-9490

See you there.

Supply update: Last week, some retailers had sold out of the book, but last I checked, it is in stock in most stores and online book retailers in North America now. It may be a few weeks before those of you in Australia, Europe and Asia start receiving copies.

I am learning more and more about the publishing business every day. I know that some (many?) of you have ordered the Continuous Integration book and it’s yet to arrive. I’m sorry to hear that and I wish I had control over it, but I don’t. Some retailers (you know who you are :-)) didn’t order enough copies of the book and there was a larger than expected demand for Continuous Integration. I’m sure you can figure out the rest. In fact, I ordered the book online from a well-known online retailer, just to see what readers would see and I’m not supposed to receive my copy until next week. One of these retailers is indicating a 4-6 week delay and I’m informed it probably won’t be that long a wait. My publisher has informed me they still have copies in stock that can be ordered at http://www.awprofessional.com/title/0321336380. Thanks for your patience.

IBM developerWorks recently interviewed me for my latest Automation for the people article called Asserting architectural soundness. Scott Laningham has a very efficient operation as the whole podcast interview process took no more than 10-15 minutes to complete. Asserting architectural soundness describes a technique to build checks into your build scripts so that you discover architectural violations as soon as they are introduced into the code. For instance, let’s say your presentation layer is making a direct call to your data layer and this is a violation to your architectural layering rules. By using the JDepend API, JUnit and Ant, I show how you can find out about this type of error as soon as you build your software. What’s more, if you’re using Continuous Integration, you’ll learn about the violation for any developer that commits code to the repository and in a consistent manner - several times a day.

Finally! After over two years, I got to see the results of my work today. We live in a world of bits and bytes and, of course, I’ve already seen the book in PDF form. But, there is something about holding the paper copy that is exhilarating. This is an advance copy I received from my publisher. It will be available to everyone else in about a week. 5,000 copies are being shipped to a warehouse as I write. They’re selling fast, so order your copy now.

JavaWorld has posted an excerpt of the CI book. If you can’t wait to get your hands on the hard copy (don’t worry, it’s only about a week away) then check out the advantages and disadvantages of CI and how CI complements other software development practices over on JavaWorld!

The company I work for, Stelligent, is hosting a “Share Your Continuous Integration War Stories” wine and cheese event at our offices in Reston, VA on Thursday, June 28th from 5:30PM - 7:00PM. You need to RSVP, so respond soon because space is limited. We are raffling off the first signed copy of the Continuous Integration book at the event.

The Continuous Integration book is available online on Safari at http://safari.informit.com/9780321336385. You can preview it or enroll in the Safari service to view the entire book online.

When I was working for a large IT company in the 1990s, I worked on a large project with over 70 developers. Software Integration was a key concern for us. At this time, I saw a full-page advertisement in an IT magazine showing a picture of a button (much like your Enter key). At the bottom of the ad, it read “If Only It Were This Easy”. I’m certain it had nothing to do with software integration, in the way I think of it, but it made an impact on me. Because, this is how I thought software integration should be: the click of a button. I worked in a group called “System Services” which provided “software infrastructure” for the project. For instance, I wrote utilities and frameworks for other developers to use. I wrote a security privileges system, a diagnostics utility and so on. If you’ve ever written for other developers, you know they/we can be a difficult lot to please. Anyway, I hung this ad in my cubicle as a reminder and metaphor for how integration should be. The good news is that, as an industry, we are getting there in a technical capacity using tools like Ant, CruiseControl and so on. However, we are still a ways off of realizing this as a common practice on projects, which is why I wrote the book and why I work every day to make this a reality with software teams.

I am in the final stages of setting up integratebutton.com. This is the companion site for the book. Since you’re reading this, you know there is a blog associated with this site. The main site will include more detailed code examples from the book, including additional tools than were used in the book. For instance, if I included an Ant example from the book, I may have a similar example in rake. This will give me an opportunity to expand on examples that would have filled up too many pages in the book.

The book on Continuous Integration is done. It is out of the “production” phase at Addison-Wesley and is currently at the printers in Indiana. I’ve worked with an incredible group of people at AW from my editors and illustrators to indexer and production manager. A class act.

I am supposed to get one copy of the book in two weeks and then it will be available to the public on June 29th, I am told. At publication, there will also be a PDF version available for purchase.