Developer to Designer, by Mike Gunderloy, contains practical advice on how to design a decent Windows application. It’s much more than just throwing some controls onto an interactive designer, writing some event handlers, and sticking a fork in it. You’ve got to pay attention to Windows user interface conventions, both written and unwritten. You’ve got to align controls properly, create predictable menus, ensure that functionality can be accessed by both mouse and keyboard, etc., etc. You’ve got to be consistent within your own application and with the other Windows applications that your users have grown comfortable with. Unless you’re one of a rare breed of developers that has a user interface designer making these decisions for you, it’s up to you to make this happen.

There’s not much in this book that can’t be learned with experience, so if you’re a Windows programming veteran that has taken care to follow the Windows user interface guidelines, you may not learn much from this book. I must admit that I found nothing surprising in the book, and couldn’t escape the feeling that any Windows programmers worth their salt should already know all of this stuff. However, if you’re relatively new to Windows programming, or haven’t really taken the time to make a Windows user interface that’s at least as good as the likes of Microsoft Office, then this book will put you on the right track.

I should mention that Developer to Designer also spends a few chapters on basic Web design. The same idea applies – if you have any experience with Web development, these chapters may seem terribly obvious, but if you’re new to Web development, this book should provide you with a good starting point.

The book also includes an appendix on what we might expect from the new user interface guidelines that will attend the next version of Windows, code-named Longhorn. If you haven’t already done much reading on the subject, this should provide a simple introduction of what is to come.

In summary, this book distills years of Windows UI design experience into one short book of great tips, so if you want to take a shortcut and start writing good user interface for Windows today, reading this book will be a great start.