Content from Microsoft’s {You Shape} It campaign has been rolled up into the ebook Developers Developers Developers Developers.  Many of the contributors are Microsoft MVPs and/ Microsoft Regional Directors.

It’s a free download and released under a Creative Commons license so share share share!

http://devshaped.com/book

http://devshaped.com/files/developersdevelopers.pdf

In the book:

Working with Brownfield Code by Donald Belcham (Microsoft MVP)

Beyond C# and VB by Ted Neward (Microsoft MVP)

Remaining Valuable to Employers featuring Barry Gervin, Billy Hollis, Bruce Johnson, Scott Howlett, Adam Cogan, and Jonathan Zuck

All I Wanted Was My Data by Barry Gervin (Microsoft Regional Director and MVP)

Efficiency Upgrade by Derek Hatchard (Microsoft Regional Director and MVP)

Getting Started with Continuous Integration by Sondre Bjellås (Microsoft Regional Director and MVP)

On Strike at the Software Factory by Daniel Crenna (Microsoft MVP)

C# Features You Should Be Using by Ted Neward (Microsoft MVP)

Accelerate Your Coding with Code Snippets by Brian Noyes (Microsoft Regional Director and MVP)

Is Silverlight 2 Ready for Business Applications? by Jonas Follesø (Microsoft Regional Director and MVP)

Innovate with Silverlight 2 by Daniel Crenna (Microsoft MVP)

Real World WPF: Rich UI + HD by Gill Cleeren (Microsoft Regional Director and MVP)

Hidden Talents by Peter Jones

Creating Useful Installers with Custom Actions by Christian Jacob

Banking with XML by Peter Jones

Sending Email by Derek Hatchard (Microsoft Regional Director and MVP)

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/06/21/50-fresh-javascript-tools-that-will-improve-your-workflow/

WPF and Silverlight are both XAML based platforms but there are some important functionality and implementation differences between the two.

For the full scoop on the differences between WPF and Silverlight, download the whitepaper "Programmatic Differences Between Silverlight and WPF" written by the folks at Wintellect.

http://wpfslguidance.codeplex.com/

This form contains three fields for what is basically one thing:  a telephone number.  There is some JavaScript in there that bounces focus from one field to the next as you type, which is convenient unless you need to go back to edit the last field.

You know what this form really does?  It offloads data formatting / parsing work to the end user.  It is trivial to write server code that extracts only the digits from a free form telephone field.  There is no good reason to make the user think this hard to enter a phone number.

If you build forms, especially web forms, you need to watch Luke Wroblewski’s session from MIX09.  Despite the unassuming title of "Web Form Design," the session contains a lot of tips about designing forms with users in mind:

http://videos.visitmix.com/MIX09/C17F

Luke’s guidance is infinitely more useful than this little rant of a post and is backed up by data.

If you’re interested in productivity, you might also be interested in the Visual Studio ASPX Edit Helper, a little tool a whipped up one afternoon and have never updated. :)  (Hey, the source code is there for download if you want to beef it up).

http://devshaped.com/2009/01/working-with-brownfield-code/

http://devshaped.com/2009/01/donald-belcham-on-brownfield-development/

[O]pen source software is not only available but also more popular on Windows. Note that of the top 25, there were 16 projects available only for Windows and none that were available only for Linux.

http://www.vinodunny.com/blog/post/OSS-for-Windows–SourceForge.aspx

This definitely matches my anecdotal experience. I have rarely looked for something on SourceForge that wasn’t available for Windows.

The fix was simple: add the plain text view to the message first.  Yup, that’s all it took: