Guidance on Complete Application Development Practices

Question

For the last five or more years I have been working mainly on ongoing, large projects. I now wish to expand my scope of work and I realise I have fallen behind in best practices for developing, deploying, and supporting, complete and discrete applications or components. I would appreciate some pointers to books, articles, and web sites that focus on this aspect of development.

I'm looking for, example, guidance on UI design and navigation, configuration, deployment, security, etc. Anything that I am currently missing by just adding functionality to existing applications.

Answer 1

See the Patterns and Practices site.

Answer 2

I can spew a short buzzword list, if that helps. I've been confronted by one or more of these in every project in the last two years. You could easily spend months on any one of these subjects.

1. "Cloud computing" (and it's evil cousins, The Mashup and SaaS)
2. Aspect-Oriented Programming
3. Domain Driven Design
4. Inversion of Control/Dependency Injection
5. ASP.NET MVC (of which StackOverflow is a shining example)
6. ORMs -- NHibernate, Subsonic, maybe Entity Framework someday ;-)
7. "Agile" methodologies (Scrum being the primary choice)
8. REST v. WS/SOAP (I'm pretty sure this silly flame war is over)

Answer 3

For basic UI design I would suggest

Books

The Design of Everyday Things
Don't Make Me Think
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
The Non-Designer's Design Book

Answer 4

John linked the P&P site which is great. But, they also specifically have an Application Architecture Guide ebook. It's a good read and free. It addresses the types of topics you are asking about.