The zen of problem solving.

Sometimes I can be an angry coder. I get stuck on a problem I convince myself ought to be trivial and I get extremely worked up to the point where I feel like breaking something. This happened to me tonight when I was trying to figure out why a custom ASP.NET server control wasn't working as expected.

Long story short - I spent an embarrassing amount of time thrashing around on the net trying to find answers to a non existent problem. Two minutes, literally two minutes after I'd given up and had packed up for the night I realised what the problem was!

The answer was to simply step back a bit from the problem and relax. The lesson: Bring a little zen to your problem solving and you're likely to be a far more productive and stress free programmer.

And no, I'm not going to tell you what the problem was - it's simply too embarrassing.