In his revolutionary bestseller, The Long Tail, Chris Anderson demonstrated how the online marketplace creates niche markets, allowing products and consumers to connect in a way that has never been possible before. Now, in Free, he makes the compelling case that in many instances businesses can profit more from giving things away than they can by charging for them. Far more than a promotional gimmick, Free is a business strategy that may well be essential to a company's survival.
The costs associated with the growing online economy are trending toward zero at an incredible rate. Never in the course of human history have the primary inputs to an industrial economy fallen in price so fast and for so long. Just think that in 1961, a single transistor cost $10; now Intel's latest chip has two billion transistors and sells for $300 (or 0.000015 cents per transistor--effectively too cheap to price). The traditional economics of scarcity just don't apply to bandwidth, processing power, and hard-drive storage.
Yet this is just one engine behind the new Free, a reality that goes beyond a marketing gimmick or a cross-subsidy. Anderson also points to the growth of the reputation economy; explains different models for unleashing the power of Free; and shows how to compete when your competitors are giving away what you're trying to sell.
In Free, Chris Anderson explores this radical idea for the new global economy and demonstrates how this revolutionary price can be harnessed for the benefit of consumers and businesses alike.
]]>This book will guide you through the process of designing and developing enterprise-strength business applications in Silverlight 3 and C#. You will learn how to take advantage of the power of Silverlight to develop rich and robust business applications, from getting started to deployment, and everything in between.
In particular, this book will serve developers who want to learn how to design business applications, and introduce the patterns to use, the issues that you’ll face, and how to resolve them. Chris Anderson, who has been building line-of-business applications for years, demonstrates his experience through a candid presentation of how to tackle real-life issues, rather than just avoid them. Benefit from his hard-won expertise through business application design patterns that he shares throughout the book.
With this book in hand, you will
<ul> <li>Create a fully functional business application in Silverlight</li> <li>Discover how to satisfy all of the general requirements that most business applications need</li> <li>Develop a business application framework</li> </ul> <h3>What you’ll learn</h3> <ul> <li>How to structure your project to ensure a robust and maintainable application</li> <li>How to create user interfaces with XAML and bind controls to data</li> <li>How to communicate securely between the server and the client</li> <li>How to view and maintain data within a Silverlight user interface</li> <li>How to design unique user experiences and use advanced styling techniques</li> <li>How to implement standard business application paradigms in Silverlight</li> </ul> <h3>Who is this book for? </h3>This book is for developers experienced in other .NET technologies, such as WinForms or ASP.NET, looking to translate their existing skills to developing business applications with Silverlight. Patterns and methodologies associated with building robust applications will be introduced and are not prerequisite knowledge.
]]>Visual Studio allows you to create and manage programming projects for the Windows platform, and the new 2010 version has undergone a major overhaul comprised of significant changes. Written by an author team of veteran programmers and developers, this book gets you quickly up to speed on what you can expect from the newest version of Visual Studio.
Packed with helpful examples, this comprehensive guide explains how Visual Studio 2010 offers you a unique look at the beginning of the IDE's evolution: improved code navigation, annotation and extensibility with the WPF-based shell; better performance and scalability for native code; and fundamental improvements in debugging and test-driven development. <ul> <li>Examines the new features of Visual Studio 2010, which allows you to create and manage programming projects for the Windows platform <li>Walks you through every facet of the Integrated Development Environment (IDE), from common tasks and functions to its powerful tools <li>Offers real-world uses for each tool, command, and shortcut of the IDE so that you can easily apply what you learn as you progress through the book <li>Includes coverage of application platforms that are supported by Visual Studio 2010, including SharePoint, Windows Azure, RIA Services, and the ADO.NET Entity Framework <li>Features additional code samples in C#, as requested by readers of previous editions
With this book, you'll explore each aspect of the development life cycle from a perspective of how Visual Studio 2010 can make your life easier.
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