A great list of JavaScript tools and resources was recently posted over at Smashing Magazine:

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/06/21/50-fresh-javascript-tools-that-will-improve-your-workflow/

WPF and Silverlight are both XAML based platforms but there are some important functionality and implementation differences between the two.

For the full scoop on the differences between WPF and Silverlight, download the whitepaper "Programmatic Differences Between Silverlight and WPF" written by the folks at Wintellect.

http://wpfslguidance.codeplex.com/

<br/><a href="http://video.msn.com/video.aspx?vid=385cfae8-fe7f-4cdc-b61a-1f8e322b526a" target="_new" title="A Microsoft Support Callback">Video: A Microsoft Support Callback</a>

Here’s the first in the series of comics about developers coming from Microsoft:

A simple challenge to all developers building user interfaces:  think for a moment before making a form overly complicated.  The form below is for reverse phone number lookups:

This form contains three fields for what is basically one thing:  a telephone number.  There is some JavaScript in there that bounces focus from one field to the next as you type, which is convenient unless you need to go back to edit the last field.

You know what this form really does?  It offloads data formatting / parsing work to the end user.  It is trivial to write server code that extracts only the digits from a free form telephone field.  There is no good reason to make the user think this hard to enter a phone number.

If you build forms, especially web forms, you need to watch Luke Wroblewski’s session from MIX09.  Despite the unassuming title of "Web Form Design," the session contains a lot of tips about designing forms with users in mind:

http://videos.visitmix.com/MIX09/C17F

Luke’s guidance is infinitely more useful than this little rant of a post and is backed up by data.

Want to be more productive as a developer? There’s some cool stuff you can do with code snippets in Visual Studio. Brian Noyes has a good overview on here, including some things I’m embarrassed to admit that I did not know.

If you’re interested in productivity, you might also be interested in the Visual Studio ASPX Edit Helper, a little tool a whipped up one afternoon and have never updated. :)  (Hey, the source code is there for download if you want to beef it up).

Donald Belcham has a great article and accompanying interview on "Brownfield Development" as part of Microsoft {You Shape} It:

http://devshaped.com/2009/01/working-with-brownfield-code/

http://devshaped.com/2009/01/donald-belcham-on-brownfield-development/

This is interesting though not totally surprising:

[O]pen source software is not only available but also more popular on Windows. Note that of the top 25, there were 16 projects available only for Windows and none that were available only for Linux.

http://www.vinodunny.com/blog/post/OSS-for-Windows–SourceForge.aspx

This definitely matches my anecdotal experience. I have rarely looked for something on SourceForge that wasn’t available for Windows.

I was just tweaking some code that sends out email. I noticed in Gmail that the plain text version of the email was being shown even though it was a multipart message with both plain text and HTML alternatives provided.

The fix was simple: add the plain text view to the message first.  Yup, that’s all it took:

Oh how I love and loathe the yearly cycle of predictions… Hard drives will get bigger! Processors will get faster and gain more cores! Web pages will get heavier! Billy Hollis will reiterate his doctrine of smart client superiority! Vertigo Software will release some new app that will make everyone feel inadequate! Richard Campbell will say something that reminds me of how dinky my podcast is compared to .NET Rocks! Joel from Canada will say something about VSTS! Tim Huckaby will architect a Microsoft Surface app that solves world hunger, climate change, and global conflict with hand gestures!

And so it goes for another year…

Of course I do have a few genuine predictions for 2009:

• PDC 2009 will be about mobile and other portable devices
• Microsoft will pre-announce a mobile app store but it will be mostly vaporware in 2009
• Windows 7 beta releases will show tremendous promise and will begin to restore faith in Microsoft’s ability to ship a great desktop OS experience
• Microsoft will demonstrate serious support for low power netbooks in Windows 7 betas
• Developers will have lackluster interest in Dev 10 (Visual Studio 2010) and .NET 4 due to technical readiness / learning fatigue
• Silverlight will become a veritable force for browser-based RIA development within the firewall but will remain far behind Flash/Flex for public facing RIA despite a steady increase in client installations
• Underutilized developer brain power (due to the economic downturn) will yield a new Internet-based innovation but not on the same scale as blogging (a product of the dotcom bust)
• Microsoft will not buy Yahoo! but we’ll still be talking about it all year long as Yahoo! loses value and market share
• Facebook will continue to annoy me as a user and tempt me as an entrepreneur as it further solidifies its position as the primary social networking application
• Twitter will experiment with monetization
• Cloud computing will be on everyone’s mind and the industry will begin to more fully address issues such as identity management / federation, multi-factor authentication, system integration, and data location guarantees when using resources in the cloud.
• A new wave of people will start complaining about the term "cloud computing" and try to introduce new jargon without success.

What do YOU think will happen in 2009?