In your development time, you might have heard of the SOLID development design principles that aim to keep you and your application well structured and on track. If you haven't had the time to learn much about them, you should consider this new post from Pim Elshoff that briefly covers each principle (with some code examples along the way).

Oh how we love acronyms. We’ve discussed a lot about writing a class, but we haven’t talked about writing classes yet. How do you know if your solution is right? It is not enough to have a working program. SOLID is a set of principles that define severable measurable properties your architecture should have at least, in order to be dubbed right.

He goes through each of the principles (single responsibility principle, Liskov substitution principle, etc) and gives a summary statement, a definition and code illustrating it in use. The examples aren't all based on the same code as implementing all of these principles at once as been found to be difficult. He also includes another principle to keep in mind - the "Law of Demeter" dealing with calling scope of properties and methods.