Interview: Maarten Balliauw, Author of ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Quickly

Maarten Balliauw is the author of ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Quickly which enables you to design, develop, and test powerful and robust web applications with MVC framework the agile way.

Maarten has a Bachelor’s Degree in Software Engineering and has 7 years of experience in software development. He started his career during his studies where he founded a company doing web development in PHP and ASP.NET. After graduation, he sold his shares and joined one of the largest ICT companies in Belgium, RealDolmen, where he
continued web application development in ASP.NET and application lifecycle management in Visual Studio Team System. He is a Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist ASP.NET and works with the latest Microsoft technologies such as LINQ and ASP.NET 3.5, and has published many articles in both PHP and .NET literature such as MSDN magazine Belgium.

Maarten’s blog is at http://blog.maartenballiauw.be and you can find him on Twitter: http://twitter.com/maartenballiauw

Packt: How did you find the overall experience of writing your book for Packt?
Maarten: Overall, writing my book for Packt was an interesting and fun experience. It gave me an excuse to do extensive research on the topic ASP.NET MVC and become really familiar with the product and its internals. The process was also rewarding: it’s cool to see that box arrive with some glossy, physical copies of your work in it.

Packt: During the writing process, did you come across any issues/ difficulties that affected your writing and how did you overcome these?
Maarten: I decided to write in English, which is not my native language. This was actually quite a hard one; writing in English was not a problem but writing a good,
solid and interesting piece of text is not that easy when writing longer texts, compared to the average blog post I was used to writing. Another thing I would mention is that I tortured myself writing about a product that was not even in beta yet! I started writing with ASP.NET MVC preview 3, updated it to preview 4, 5, beta, release candidate ... There were lots of changes in the ASP.NET MVC API or concepts which meant lots of changes had to be made to the chapters I had already wrote. Luckily, I survived :-). I contacted Packt when I had finished 60% of my book. If you are considering writing: don't do this! Contact a publisher at a very early stage: they normally give you lots of advice upfront, which I only received after contacting them. Receiving advice early on is always better, so that's something I would definitely do differently if I could.

Packt: Whilst writing your book, did you find that it overshadowed personal life in any way? How did you deal with this?
Maarten: Actually, it did not. Of course, I spent a lot of hours writing on the evening, but I managed to limit this to 1-2 evenings per week and near the end of the writing process a few hours at theweekend. My family was very supportive during this period, probably because they were as curious as I was about getting a paper book with a picture of my glasses on it :-)

Packt: Was there anything interesting that happened during the writing of the book?
Maarten: No, nothing spectacular.

Packt: How did our Acquisition Editors help you - what kind of things did they help you with and how did they support you throughout the writing process?
Maarten: Some of the editors were not familiar with the subject and it was interesting to have their questions during the writing process, as it helped to establish the focus of the book.When my initial draft was done, the book entered the review phase. Different people received the draft version and could provide comments and suggestions.

Reviewer comments really made the book better and required me to do some small rewrites, elaborate more on certain topics that you as an author take for granted.

Packt: Our authors usually have full-time jobs whilst writing for us. Was this the case for you and how did you approach managing your time?
Maarten: Of course, my full-time job was what had to come first. However, there were some occasions where I had a few hours available and my employer let me work on the book. From your employer’s point of view, it is of course very good to have an author amongst their staff and more are appearing at my company.

Packt: What benefits did writing a book bring to your specialist area?
Maarten: Writing a book allowed me to dig very deep into the ASP.NET MVC topic. It enabled me to get slots at various occasions to speak on the topic. Ultimately, writing this book really helped in being respected as an expert on the topic.

Packt: Do you have any tips for other authors, or tricks that you learnt whilst writing, that you'd like to share?
Maarten:Yes, contact Packt at the beginning! Don’t just begin writing and make finding a publisher a next priority. The acquisition editors at Packt are familiar with writing books and you are probably not. They help you a lot! Also, regularly make backups of your work and keep older versions as sometimes you may want to use a previously removed paragraph in another chapter for instance.

Packt: Do you have any advice for other authors who may be interested in writing for Packt, but are still unsure?
Maarten: Dive in! Really, you can never invest 100% of your time in it but I can guarantee it is very rewarding!

Packt: What projects, if any, are you working on at the moment?
Maarten: At the moment, I am working on various projects for my employer on ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, VSTS, Windows Azure and PHP. Perhaps, another book at some point, but at the moment, the biggest project of all is now in my spare time: constructing a home.

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