Patterns and Practices of Software Development

It appears to be low profile so I hadn't heard of this until a co-worker pointed out this MS Wiki where they are putting together a community to work on documenting patterns and practices.

Microsoft's Patterns and Practices Guidance Library

This is useful in two ways, (1) in defining some templates for creating better documentation. For instance there is a template for writing a Mini How To. It lists a number of good ideas to consider while writing a How To. (2) It provides documentation, an example How To: How To: Use Regular Expressions to Constrain Input in ASP.NET. Another example is they have checklists for instance they have a Web Services Security Checklist.

From my observation there are not necessarily 'deep' thoughts here. The statements all make sense, to the point that it seems like stating the obvious. The value is in that the thought have been persisted, collected and present in a clean and concise way. This means that in our haste to get a product out the door, we can walk through a relatively simple list to verify we didn't miss something obvious.

A good idea. I hope it continues to have contributions and a community is built around this.