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.

Tim Ewald, one of my closest friends and the guy I think deserves to be much more famous (the first chapter of his criminally under-selling Transactional COM+ is worth the price of a Hawaiian honeymoon and is just as fulfilling) is blogging.

In fact, he’s been blogging for a few weeks now, but he’s teased me before, so I didn’t want to point people his way if he was just going to break my heart again. Still, he seems to be on a roll. My most favorite post is XmlSerializer sans XSD, but his recent post on why he cares about the angle brackets on the wire pushed me over the edge.

Don’t disappoint us by going away again, Tim!

BTW, Roger Searjeant built some tools to support Tim’s ideas.

Tim Sneath has a nice, concise list of what’s new in Windows Forms 2.0. By far and away, ClickOnce deployment as an order of magnitude improvement over No-Touch Deployment is my favorite advance, but the new controls are cool (you can drop the standard buttons on the menu and toolstrips from the context menu), the BackgroundWorker is very cool (and eliminates about 2/3rds of the code in my threading chapter) and the designer layout assistance for helping with the layout and spacing of controls sounds like it'll reduce a bunch of monkey work in the designer.

Cool piece by Andrew Troelsen on the new refactoring features in Visual Studio 2005 for C#. Now I just have to train myself to think to use the refactoring operations instead of letting my fingers do it as they've been forced to for lo these many years...

Right now, I'm holding the shared source Genghis library back. I'm acting as sole arbiter of what makes it into Genghis and how and I'm not able to keep up with the flow. I'm looking for someone who's interested in sharing this duty with me. Only proven contributors to the Windows development community need apply.

MSDN shipped their part of Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1 at about 12:30am on Tuesday morning. Sara has a nice summary of the new MSDN Product Feedback Center that I think folks will find particularly satisfying:

“At the MSDN Product Feedback Center, you can submit bugs and suggestions. You can search through other people’s submitted bugs and suggestions. You can vote for your favorites. You can share workarounds. And, you can see feedback and details directly from folks on our product teams. Oh, and you can get notified when the status of an issue you’re interested in changes.”

In other words, developer feedback to the product teams for the supported products is no longer just an email or a post, but an entry in a database that the product team and you can track. I can’t wait to get this for Longhorn.

Also, Kent has announced the new Visual Studio 2005 Developer Center, complete with next-gen personalization features that we’re testing on this content before we push them out site-wide. My favorite part of the site is the bit where the product teams that contribute to .NET 2.0 point out what’s new (and the Windows Forms team even tell you how they’re progressing on the features they’re implementing).

Kent also points out the site for the new Visual Studio 2005 Express Edition, the beta of a slim and trim VS05 for students, hobbyists, etc. that you can download immediately. There’s even a contest for Express users where the prizes include an XBox and a copy of Halo 2.

Duncan also has a post where he addresses our current philosophy on coverage of shipping vs. future content on MSDN and why TechEd is going to throw it “out of whack” for a while (except me, of course, who’s going to be out of whack for a good long time : ).

NOTE: Beta 1 of Visual Studio 2005 will not install on Longhorn. Hopefully the next community drop of Longhorn will include a matching drop of VS05, but as of today, they remain incompatible.