Design Guidelines
Comments, additions, and Specializations on the .NET Class Library Guidelines and other Software development design guidelines
The Microsoft PowerShell team published an important standard: Microsoft Command Line Standard. As PM Jeffrey Snover explains in his post, the document is divided in three sections:
Snover's core recommendation is, if course, to create PowerShell Cmdlets so you can easily support this standard.
Dare Obasanjo has a post with a great link to a study on how to perform web page usability testing and the impact of usability on web page design.
Microsoft has just released SQL Compact, an upgrade of SQL Mobile that supports the desktop. Here's a white paper describing when to use Compact over Expression edition. Upshot? Application embedded database in SQL Compact. Lightweight, but full featured DB in Express Ed.
Not mentioned but I'd have to think that SQL Compact has a much nicer deployment story.
At the end of Aaron Skonnard's September 2006 Service Station article on System.Xml 2.0, he summarizes with a list of guidelines. Read and do.
- Always use the static Create factory methods for creating readers and writers, even when you need support for things such as validation.
- If you care about performance, you should always use XPathDocument as your in-memory store when querying or transforming the document.
- Only use XmlDocument when you need an editable store, and when you do need one, use XPathNavigator to write the updating logic.
- Always use XslCompiledTransform to execute XSLT transformations when you're concerned about performance.
- Take advantage of the various API improvements to simplify your code.
- Read "What's New in System.Xml for Visual Studio 2005 and the .NET Framework 2.0 Release," by Mark Fussell