The Developer Highway Code Free when you purchase a selected Microsoft title

13 February 2007

I suspect the book is only available in the UK as it is titled based on a UK Government Publication "The Highway Code" which gives drivers details of the legal aspects of driving in the UK. I suspect there is a similar book available in the US and other countries, but I don't know what it is called.

The Developer Highway Code is a guide to producing safer / more secure programmes, looking at developing both web and traditional applications. The majority of the book is a series of checklists to ensure that you are taking the security aspects into consideration. Many of these are obvious, like validating user input, but some provide useful information that you may otherwise have overlooked.

The book also includes some useful information such as how security should be included in the design and lifecycle of any software project, security design guidelines for developing web applications and threat modelling. The book includes .Net version 2.

The book I actually bought is the Build a Program Now! Visual C# 2005 Express Edition book. I was actually looking for a book on Mono at the time, which I bought as well. The Mono book is: Mono: A Developer’s Notebook by Dubill and Bornstein, although that one hasn't arrived yet.

I'm wanting to learn C#, and although this is primarily for programming in Linux, I'm also going to be having a go using Windows and the Microsoft Visual C#. So armed with these new books, and continuing with the Linux Format tutorials I hope to be able to put something together. Now the only problem is finding the time ...