Why are style guides so frequently created, but so rarely successful? All too often, businesses ask for a style guide as a means to create a common look and feel, in the belief that it will solve usability problems and establish consistency between applications – only to be disappointed in the results. Even if such a style guide is followed carefully, the resulting interfaces may not meet usability goals.. This paper explores strategies for creating a style guide that is more than a simplistic rules book. By making the style guide part of the process, it can be used to promote a shared vision, to help the product meet business and usability requirements for consistency and…it may actually be used.
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Berkeley Madonna is a program that numerically solves systems of ordinary differential equations (ODEs) and difference equations. It was originally developed to execute models written in STELLA® more quickly. Over time, we added our own unique features which have made Berkeley Madonna into a fast, self-contained, and easy-to-use modeling tool. Berkeley Madonna is available for both Macintosh and Windows platforms. While these versions are mostly identical, there are some differences which are noted throughout this guide with the notation [Macintosh] or [Windows].
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With each new major release of Microsoft Visual Studio, Microsoft changes the languages and methodologies for building executables from the source created within an application. Without the assistance of simplification tools, then, development teams integrating Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 and Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 must re-write and redesign significant amounts of their application build processes. But, such an endeavor proves so costly and time-consuming that many enterprises choose to delay or omit upgrades to their development environments. Unfortunately, avoidance will quickly create a situation where new applications are written in the new Visual Studio but without compatibility to the vast amount of programs and systems that were developed in older versions.
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Whether you want to build an AJAX-based web application, or a Windows game, the Academic Resource Kit is a great place to start. A Microsoft Romania initiative aimed at driving technology access and adoption, ARK is designed as a comprehensive collection of tools and resources addressing both the development and design aspects of building software solutions. I had the chance to chat with Microsoft Romania’s Todi Pruteanu about the ARK initiative, and the interview below will provide you with a great insight into the Academic Resource Kit.
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Typical content distribution solutions are based on placing dedicated equipment inside or at the edge of the Internet. The best example of such solutions is Akamai [1], which runs several tens of thousands of servers all over the world. In recent years, a new paradigm for Content Distribution has emerged based on a fully distributed architecture where commodity PCs are used to form a cooperative network and share their resources (storage, CPU, bandwidth).
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.NET Micro Framework (.NET MF) is a new technology that can be applied to a variety of small devices. For a relatively new technology, there are already several different development tools and a platform standard already available. Some of the development tools are still in beta, and as you can guess new ideas are already in the works. This application note is a guide to what tools are available for application development. This application note will be updated as new tools become available.
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The goal for F5 and Microsoft® was to enable applications to send control messages to network devices, providing a layer between the network and the application as it added new intelligence. With this capability, the network can inform applications about availability, and the application instructs the network on where to direct traffic – without manual intervention and its associated costs. With this highly available, extremely secure solution in place, enterprises can expect increased ROI from their Web applications.
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The Human Interactions in Programming (HIP) team in Microsoft Research applies human- centered research techniques to builds tools that improve the software development process. The joke goes, “we build tools as if software were made by people … working together.” As a human-centered effort, we draw from various research fields including human-computer interaction, information visualization, computer-supported cooperative work, and social computing. The central tenet of these fields is that one needs to understand the user in order to design tools to support them. To this end we have initiated a series of investigations to understand software development at Microsoft. Our research builds on a rich history of research into professional software development practices [1, 2, 4, 5, 6, and 7]. This document describes the process we used, what we learned, and directions for future user research.

METHODOLOGY
We performed two surveys and several face-to-face interviews of developers at Microsoft during the summer of 2005. The first survey contained 205 questions asking how developers spend their time, what tools they use, and the severity of various problems they face. We deployed it to 1000 architects, software developers and software test developers randomly selected from the Microsoft address book by job title. We received 157 responses, though the data presented here includes only the 104 responses from the developers.

Next we performed semi-structured interviews with six software development leads and five software developers drawn from our survey respondents. Each was done by two interviewers, who took copious notes. Each interview lasted about an hour. Most were recorded on audio. To find the themes latent in the notes we transcribed them onto 800 3×5” cards and did a massive card sort exercise.

Download pdf Software Development at Microsoft Observed

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