Free mousetraps
I'm somewhat impressed by the relatively recent initiative at Microsoft to propagate patterns and practices to the development community. This isn't a new thing - IBM and Sun have been doing things like this for years, but it is a first for Microsoft. They've always offered some advice on MSDN, but it was scattered and inconsistent. Their current offerings much more consistent and better organized. I've examined two of the offerings the Data Access Application Block and the Exception Management Application Block and they both are useful. They aren't groundbreaking, but good design often isn't.