Greetings and Happy New Year,
As we embark on the New Year, it's worth reminding developers about one of the greatest strengths of Microsoft's development technologies: the highly involved communities of developers, designers, and architects. Perhaps some the most accessible and useable outputs from the community are sample code, and there are several places to find it. If you haven't trolled around the
MSDN site recently, you'll notice that it's now all about community, with an emphasis on contributed content. There you can find a wealth of code samples by linking to places like
MSDN Code Gallery, a site where third parties can download and share sample applications, code snippets, and other resources with the greater developer community.
For open source projects, you can start a new project, join an existing one, or download software created by the community on
CodePlex, Microsoft's open source project hosting Web site.
And if you are looking for products and extensions for Visual Studio, you'll find hundreds of third-party products for download in the
Visual Studio Gallery.
Note that in each case, Microsoft does not control, review, revise, or distribute the third party community content contributed to these sites.
Finally, here's something fun that still has a useful message:
Read the Amazing Adventures of Kevlarr and the Security Development Lifecycle. In this interactive game, you follow the quest of Kevlarr, an ordinary software developer, as he finds his inner super powers to build and protect a more fortified application. Villains from the League of Malware are tearing down the newly constructed walls of an application in development-threatening the company's security and success. Can one man succeed in time for launch?
