Last spring I co-authored this book, Practical Guidelines and Best Practices for Microsoft Visual Basic .NET and Visual C# Developers, arguably the longest title in Microsoft Press's history. The book is a reasoned list of guidelines that all .NET developers should follow, actually is by far the largest collection of its kind you can find anywhere. It covers language syntax, memory usage, Windows Forms and ASP.NET applications, security, and more.

Unlike most other similar collections, though, we clearly divide the "rules" in guidelines (naming guidelines, comment usage, etc.) and best practices. The difference is subtle but important: most guidelines are primarily a style matter, whereas best practices impact the scalability, the speed, or the robustness of your application. This means that our guidelines are arbitrary and in fact we often offer alternate rules and clearly explain the pros and cons of each style.

You can learn more about the principles we used in the book's Introduction and in John Robbins's Foreword. (Unlike most foreword writers, John actually read each and every page in the manuscript and gave us some great advice about improving it.) Or click the figure to jump to the book's home page, where you can read three sample chapters and download the book's source code.

Today I have uploaded a 30-page Word document that contains a summary of all the rules covered in the book, orderly grouped by topic and with a reference where in the book each rule is explained. You can edit this document as you see fit, delete or edit the guidelines you aren't interested in, and so forth. We routinely use this document in internal code reviews or when we consult at customers' places, so we hope it will be useful to you as well.

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