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. : )

Apparently Eric Gunnerson, confident that C# is now perfect (and who can blame him?) has decided to work on the Longhorn Movie Maker team (and who can blame him?).

I find these strangely compelling, especially this one:

Languages Zen Koan:
“One day Fred was working with .NET. He overheard a programmer say to his superior, “Give me the best programming language you have.” “Every language in .NET is the best,” replied the butcher. “You can not find any language in .NET that is not the best.” At these words, Fred was enlightened.”