While not nearly as extensive as Christophe Nasarre's 3-part look at MSBuild (part 1, part 2 and part 3), Klaus Aschenbrenner has provided a nice 3-page overview of MSBuild, including the major elements, a "hello world" .proj file and even a quick look at building custom tasks.

In his piece Software Practitioner Triad (I know it’s old, but I just got pointed to it by Phil Weber), Alan Cooper points out three different folks needed to design and build software:

• Architect: responsible for determining who the user is, what he or she is trying to accomplish, and what behavior the software must exhibit to satisfy these human goals.
• Engineer: technical problem solving via experimentation, not fettered with the demands of producing release code.
• Programmer: producing a shippable product, consisting mostly of protective code that rarely—if ever—executes, but is dedicated to supporting obscure edge cases, platform idiosyncrasies, and error conditions.

I’ve done all three, but am happiest with architect and engineer. Where are you in your current job? Where do you want to be?

A friend of mine IM’d me just a few moments ago and asked, “When you’re sitting in front of a code editor and you have no motivation, what do you do?”

I hereby dub this “programmer’s block” and since I’ve never had it (which I’m just now realizing is pretty weird), I wondering if you can offer my friend some advice. Thanks!

I really love Mitch’s idea for a “Builder” in the Visual Studio Code View:

There are tons of hidden strings in code that would benefit from such a thing, e.g. data provider-specific connection and query strings, and I’d gladly rebuild my FormatDesigner as a Builder. I wonder if the VSIP SDK is powerful enough to implement it…

Have you got opinions about how information is arranged on MSDN? Do you have issues with the Table of Contents? Are you just looking for some way to fight back against the machine? If so, check out Paula Land’s blog.

Paula is MSDN’s Chief Information Architect and she’s provided a sneak peak at MSDN’s new TOC. If you’ve got comments, now’s the time.

Karsten Jzkdliguloiuski has updated his Avalon 3D Donut to be more delicious and interactive and to fly! Enjoy.

In the interview, Don answers questions like "How did you get started in computer technologies" and "What's your favorite vegetable," but he also answers much more interesting questions like “I’m perfectly happy using ASMX for Web services - why should I care about Indigo?” and “So, how will Indigo be better than WSE 2.0?”

Mike Weinhardt lists his favorite new features in Windows Forms 2.0, not only bringing my “butt” into it, but making it sound like a good thing. : )