Welcome to the premier edition of Platform Development Best Practices!

Platform Development Best Practices was created to bridge the gap between high level product initiatives (such as "lowering TCO" or becoming "Internet enabled") and API documentation that exhaustively describes the programming interface, but can't provide an initiative-centric context. For more details see About Platform Development Best Practices.

What's in this edition

Application developers are hearing a call to action from users and administrators alike. Their applications must

• Be simple to use
• Be easy to set up
• Enable users at home to share the same machine while providing privacy and separation
• Enable users in the workplace to log on to any computer and find their current files and settings
• Be easy for network administrators to manage from a central server
• Be inexpensive to deploy, maintain, update, and manage