If you're a Raymond Chen fan and enjoy hearing about Windows lore, did you know he's compiled some of his best stuff into a book? It's almost time for the holidays, you know...(hint hint). The nice thing about Raymond is he speaks the truth, especially about the culture in Microsoft and what can sometimes be inane to you or me but is someone's pet project that demands you to follow the letter of the law, take for example his recent post on 'No good deed goes unpunished: Free code samples'. Or some of my favorite posts on 'Microspeak'. The thing about Microspeak is that all too often i find myself wincing when I read these because as a manager I fall into this habit of using microspeak, (I blame Marketing :-) ), take for instance: Value proposition , or Actionable, or one of my favorites - The forcing function. But that's just his web site!

Here's a few of the things you'll find inside Raymond's book:

• What vending machines can teach you about effective user interfaces?
• 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

- Andy