A wealth of open and free software is available today for Windows developers who want to extend the development environment, reduce development effort, and increase productivity. This encyclopedic guide explores more than 100 free and open source tools available to programmers who build applications for Windows desktops and servers.

The instant New York Times bestseller. From Microsoft's president and one of the tech industry's broadest thinkers, a frank and thoughtful reckoning with how to balance enormous promise and existential risk as the digitization of everything accelerates. “A colorful and insightful insiders’ view of how technology is both empowering and threatening us. From privacy to cyberattacks, this timely book is a useful guide for how to navigate the digital future.” —Walter Isaacson Microsoft President Brad Smith operates by a simple core belief: When your technology changes the world, you bear a responsibility to help address the world you have helped create. This might seem uncontroversial, but it flies in the face of a tech sector long obsessed with rapid growth and sometimes on disruption as an end in itself. While sweeping digital transformation holds great promise, we have reached an inflection point. The world has turned information technology into both a powerful tool and a formidable weapon, and new approaches are needed to manage an era defined by even more powerful inventions like artificial intelligence. Companies that create technology must accept greater responsibility for the future, and governments will need to regulate technology by moving faster and catching up with the pace of innovation. In Tools and Weapons, Brad Smith and Carol Ann Browne bring us a captivating narrative from the cockpit of one of the world's largest and most powerful tech companies as it finds itself in the middle of some of the thorniest emerging issues of our time. These are challenges that come with no preexisting playbook, including privacy, cybercrime and cyberwar, social media, the moral conundrums of artificial intelligence, big tech's relationship to inequality, and the challenges for democracy, far and near. While in no way a self-glorifying "Microsoft memoir," the book pulls back the curtain remarkably wide onto some of the company's most crucial recent decision points as it strives to protect the hopes technology offers against the very real threats it also presents. There are huge ramifications for communities and countries, and Brad Smith provides a thoughtful and urgent contribution to that effort.

Addressing general readers as well as software practitioners, "Software and Mind" discusses the fallacies of the mechanistic ideology and the degradation of minds caused by these fallacies. Mechanism holds that every aspect of the world can be represented as a simple hierarchical structure of entities. But, while useful in fields like mathematics and manufacturing, this idea is generally worthless, because most aspects of the world are too complex to be reduced to simple hierarchical structures. Our software-related affairs, in particular, cannot be represented in this fashion. And yet, all programming theories and development systems, and all software applications, attempt to reduce real-world problems to neat hierarchical structures of data, operations, and features. Using Karl Popper's famous principles of demarcation between science and pseudoscience, the book shows that the mechanistic ideology has turned most of our software-related activities into pseudoscientific pursuits. Using mechanism as warrant, the software elites are promoting invalid, even fraudulent, software notions. They force us to depend on generic, inferior systems, instead of allowing us to develop software skills and to create our own systems. Software mechanism emulates the methods of manufacturing, and thereby restricts us to high levels of abstraction and simple, isolated structures. The benefits of software, however, can be attained only if we start with low-level elements and learn to create complex, interacting structures. Software, the book argues, is a non-mechanistic phenomenon. So it is akin to language, not to physical objects. Like language, it permits us to mirror the world in our minds and to communicate with it. Moreover, we increasingly depend on software in everything we do, in the same way that we depend on language. Thus, being restricted to mechanistic software is like thinking and communicating while being restricted to some ready-made sentences supplied by an elite. Ultimately, by impoverishing software, our elites are achieving what the totalitarian elite described by George Orwell in "Nineteen Eighty-Four" achieves by impoverishing language: they are degrading our minds.

"Raymond Chen is the original raconteur of Windows." --Scott Hanselman, ComputerZen.com "Raymond has been at Microsoft for many years and has seen many nuances of Windows that others could only ever hope to get a glimpse of. With this book, Raymond shares his knowledge, experience, and anecdotal stories, allowing all of us to get a better understanding of the operating system that affects millions of people every day. This book has something for everyone, is a casual read, and I highly recommend it!" --Jeffrey Richter, Author/Consultant, Cofounder of Wintellect "Very interesting read. Raymond tells the inside story of why Windows is the way it is." --Eric Gunnerson, Program Manager, Microsoft Corporation "Absolutely essential reading for understanding the history of Windows, its intricacies and quirks, and why they came about." --Matt Pietrek, MSDN Magazine's Under the Hood Columnist "Raymond Chen has become something of a legend in the software industry, and in this book you'll discover why. From his high-level reminiscences on the design of the Windows Start button to his low-level discussions of GlobalAlloc that only your inner-geek could love, The Old New Thing is a captivating collection of anecdotes that will help you to truly appreciate the difficulty inherent in designing and writing quality software." --Stephen Toub, Technical Editor, MSDN Magazine Why does Windows work the way it does? Why is Shut Down on the Start menu? (And why is there a Start button, anyway?) How can I tap into the dialog loop? Why does the GetWindowText function behave so strangely? Why are registry files called "hives"? Many of Windows' quirks have perfectly logical explanations, rooted in history. Understand them, and you'll be more productive and a lot less frustrated. Raymond Chen--who's spent more than a decade on Microsoft's Windows development team--reveals the "hidden Windows" you need to know. Chen's engaging style, deep insight, and thoughtful humor have made him one of the world's premier technology bloggers. Here he brings together behind-the-scenes explanations, invaluable technical advice, and illuminating anecdotes that bring Windows to life--and help you make the most of it. A few of the things you'll find inside: What vending machines can teach you about effective user interfaces A deeper understanding of window and dialog management Why performance optimization can be so counterintuitive A peek at the underbelly of COM objects and the Visual C++ compiler Key details about backwards compatibility--what Windows does and why Windows program security holes most developers don't know about How to make your program a better Windows citizen

All true craftsmen need the best tools to do their finest work, and programmers are no different. Java Power Tools delivers 30 open source tools designed to improve the development practices of Java developers in any size team or organization. Each chapter includes a series of short articles about one particular tool -- whether it's for build systems, version control, or other aspects of the development process -- giving you the equivalent of 30 short reference books in one package. No matter which development method your team chooses, whether it's Agile, RUP, XP, SCRUM, or one of many others available, Java Power Tools provides practical techniques and tools to help you optimize the process. The book discusses key Java development problem areas and best practices, and focuses on open source tools that can help increase productivity in each area of the development cycle, including: Build tools including Ant and Maven 2 Version control tools such as CVS and Subversion, the two most prominent open source tools Quality metrics tools that measure different aspects of code quality, including CheckStyle, PMD, FindBugs and Jupiter Technical documentation tools that can help you generate good technical documentation without spending too much effort writing and maintaining it Unit Testing tools including JUnit 4, TestNG, and the open source coverage tool Cobertura Integration, Load and Performance Testing to integrate performance tests into unit tests, load-test your application, and automatically test web services, Swing interfaces and web interfaces Issue management tools including Bugzilla and Trac Continuous Integration tools such as Continuum, Cruise Control, LuntBuild and Hudson If you are a Java developer, these tools can help improve your development practices, and make your life easier in the process. Lead developers, software architects and people interested in the wider picture will be able to gather from these pages some useful ideas about improving your project infrastructure and best practices.

Harness the full power of the Visual Studio IDE to take your coding skills to the next level by learning about IDE productivity practices and exclusive techniques Key FeaturesIncrease your productivity by leveraging Visual Studio 2019's improvements and featuresExplore powerful editing, code intelligence, and source code control features to increase productivityDelve into VS’s powerful, untapped features such as custom project templates and extensionsBook Description Visual Studio 2019 (VS 2019) and Visual Studio Code (VS Code) are powerful professional development tools that help you to develop applications for any platform with ease. Whether you want to create web, mobile, or desktop applications, Microsoft Visual Studio is your one-stop solution. This book demonstrates some of the most sophisticated capabilities of the tooling and shows you how to use the integrated development environment (IDE) more efficiently to be more productive. You’ll begin by gradually building on concepts, starting with the basics. The introductory chapters cover shortcuts, snippets, and numerous optimization tricks, along with debugging techniques, source control integration, and other important IDE features that will help you make your time more productive. With that groundwork in place, more advanced concepts such as the inner workings of project and item templates are covered. You will also learn how to write quality, secure code more efficiently as well as discover how certain Visual Studio features work 'under the hood'. By the end of this Visual Studio book, you’ll have learned how to write more secure code faster than ever using your knowledge of the extensions and processes that make developing successful solutions more enjoyable and repeatable. What you will learnUnderstand the similarities and differences between VS 2019 and VS CodeGet to grips with numerous keyboard shortcuts to improve efficiencyDiscover IDE tips and tricks that make it easier to write codeExperiment with code snippets that make it easier to write repeating code patternsFind out how to customize project and item templates with the help of hands-on exercisesUse Visual Studio extensions for ease and improved productivityDelve into Visual Studio’s behind the scene operationsWho this book is for This book is for C# and .NET developers who want to become more efficient and take advantage of features they may not be aware of in the IDE. Those looking to increase their productivity and write quality code more quickly by fully utilizing the power of the Visual Studio IDE will also find this book useful.

Full Color INCLUDES COMPLETE CODE AND ASSETS FOR EACH APP IN THIS VOLUME! Got a great idea for an app? There’s a chapter for that! Calling all developers: Windows Phone 7 is starting to gain traction, and the opportunity is yours to sell the next killer app! 101 Windows Phone 7 Apps is a book series like no other–best-selling author and Microsoft developer Adam Nathan walks you through the process of building 101 real, robust, diverse, and marketplace-certified Silverlight applications. You not only get online access to the full source code and related assets, but the book is chock full of tips, warnings, and advice that can only come from Adam’s experience of writing so many complete applications and selling them in the Windows Phone Marketplace. Imagine how long it would take you to develop and test 50 apps and how much you would learn from the experience. Rather than spending all that time starting from scratch, use this book to hit the ground running! Whether you simply make cosmetic changes to apps in this book (for example, creating kid-themed versions), repurpose apps (such as building a mortgage calculator based on Chapter 10’s tip calculator), or build something completely unique, this book can greatly accelerate your development time and help you create high-quality apps. Sell your apps in the Windows Phone Marketplace and make this book pay for itself! Volume I contains the first 50 apps and covers the following: Everything you need to know about Silverlight Fully exploiting phone features such as the application bar, hardware/software keyboards, multi-touch, accelerometer, microphone, and more Using rich controls such as pivots, panoramas, and controls in free toolkits, such as date/time pickers, toggle switches, charts, and graphs Building your own custom controls, including popular ones missing from the platform, such as a checkable list box, multi-select picker box, and color picker Broadly applicable pages, such as a photo-cropping page and accelerometer-calibration page How to make your app look and feel like a first-party app Practical tips on a wide range of topics, even acquiring and creating sound effects, using custom fonts, and creating icons