As a .Net Developer, I spend a lot of time on Windows. I am fairly familiar with the Windows Desktop and Server operating systems. It can get a bit old doing the same thing over and over. While software development is by definition the building of new stuff, one can still become a little bored or wore down by doing the same kinds of things day after day. It is always wise to try to keep things fresh. Recently, it has been easy to keep things fresh in Windows-land. Its a fairly exciting time to be a .Net/Windows developer with the rapid releases of Atlas (ASP.Net AJAX), .Net 3.0 (WPF, WCF, WWF), Silverlight, and the fast approaching .Net 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008. New technologies like those listed above are like new toys to a software developer. For me, digging into WPF for the first time a year ago was in like getting a new iPod. It was a pretty new toy like the previously mentioned expensive electronic gadget, but didn't really cost me anything other than time. I suppose WPF did cost me a little in money for the books I purchased, but those costs were already factored in for me as a developer. Recently I have had the need to learn WCF. I have had the joy of a new book and a cool new technology with which I have spent the last month. Starting this week, it is Windows WorkFlow. In between work projects, I have been enjoying the Silverlight Alpha 1.1, Visual Studio 2008, and C# 3.0. There is plenty to keep the .Net developer hopping these days. Microsoft isn't the only game in town. I always encourage developers to build a Linux machine if they have not done so before. It can be difficult working outside of your comfort zone, but learning Linux/Unix is both fun and professionally rewarding. Things are done a little differently in the Linux world, and I have been surprised over the years the ideas for .Net projects that have sprung up from work done in Nix. It used to be a bit of a challenge to get a Linux machine up and running. However, new releases make it dead simple. The people at Fedora and Ubuntu are building easy to install, richly featured operating systems. You can download these for free, and Ubuntu will actually send you a disk in the mail. Redhat offers virtual machine images of Fedora configured for various uses. They call these Linux appliances. We use just such an appliance at my workplace for our Subversions Source Control server, hosted in VMWare Server. Of course if you are going to setup Linux, you will want to program on it. There are a number of programming languages that one can use on Linux. The obvious set of technologies is known as LAMP: Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. And the great thing about all of these is that they can be easily added to Linux during or after the initial install process. Out of the box, your Linux machine can be ready to program. Keep it fresh, and I think that you will experience less burn-out programming and will be learn some new stuff along the way.