Introductions: Devon Musgrave

Greetings, and welcome to Microsoft Press’s blog! We’ve been meaning to do this for a LONG LONG time, but we’ve been heads-down creating books. These books win technical publishing awards and are generally praiseworthy, but our goal is simply to make books (hard copy and e-) that are of great help to you as you learn, use, and master Microsoft software.

I’m Devon Musgrave, an editor with Press. I’ve been with Press since 1995 and, as project editor or developmental editor, I’ve helped create 100-odd books, most of them for developers. Here’s a highly abbreviated list of some of the great titles I’ve worked on:

· Sara Ford’s Microsoft Visual Studio Tips (visit Sara’s stellar blog at https://blogs.msdn.com/SaraFord/ and notice that her author proceeds go directly to sending Hurricane Katrina survivors to college)

· Sayed Hashimi & William Bartholomew’s Inside the Microsoft Build Engine

· Daniel Larson’s Developing Service-Oriented AJAX Applications on the Microsoft Platform (Dan’s blog is at https://daniellarson.spaces.live.com/)

· Simple Architectures for Complex Enterprises, by Roger Sessions (https://simplearchitectures.blogspot.com/)

· Donis Marshall’s Programming Microsoft Visual C# 2008: The Language (as well as his soon-to-be-released Solid Code, co-written with John Bruno and updating Steve Maguire’s classic Writing Solid Code)

· Laurence Moroney’s Introducing Microsoft Silverlight 2, Second Edition (Laurence’s Silverlight-focused blog is here: https://blogs.msdn.com/webnext/)

· Patrick Tisseghem & Lars Fastrup’s Inside the Index and Search Engines: Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

· Steve Suehring’s JavaScript Step by Step (not all Microsoft Press books are about Microsoft software; see the next bullet too)

· Steve McConnell’s Code Complete, Second Edition and Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art (Steve’s professional blog is here: https://blogs.construx.com/blogs/stevemcc/default.aspx)

· Michael Gernaey’s Programming Windows Services with Microsoft Visual Basic 2008

· Software Requirements, Second Edition; More About Software Requirements: Thorny Issues and Practical Advice; and Practical Project Initiation: A Handbook with Tools, all by the wonderfully mustachioed Karl Wiegers

· Charles Petzold’s Programming Windows, Fifth Edition (keep up with Charles at https://www.charlespetzold.com/blog/blog.xml)

· Andrew Whitechapel’s Microsoft .NET Development for Microsoft Office (Andrew’s blog is here: https://blogs.msdn.com/andreww/)

· Tom Archer’s two editions of Inside C#

· Web Services Architecture and Its Specifications: Essentials for Understanding WS-* , by Luis Felipe Cabrera & Chris Kurt

· The two editions of Writing Secure Code, and Writing Secure Code for Windows Vista, by Michael Howard and David LeBlanc (Michael’s blog is at https://blogs.msdn.com/michael_howard/ and David’s is here: https://blogs.msdn.com/david_leblanc/)

· The Security Development Lifecycle, by Michael Howard and Steve Lipner

I enjoy helping authors fine-tune their work for the benefit of their readers, and I’ll be posting about our always-evolving Developer list and other items of interest related to Microsoft Press. Thanks for reading, and keep in touch: devonm [at] microsoft .com.