Just another day of work, but found some really nice tools that are poping up in the web development speare, thanks to great open source community.
I was probably out of the loop for some time, but now I realise the pool of new stuff that can help development so much.
Filddler
A typical web developer life involves many times with unexpected delays and crashes and confusion around http request/response flow. Here is a great tool from Microsoft called Fiddler.
There is an ability to extend fiddler to .Net environment, look at this msdn article for more information on this.
Coming to CSS and javascript the same world of client scripts have lot more to cause confusion and frustration in development.
Developer tools from chrispederick.com provides great features with what they call Web Developer Extentioned/plug ins that install on your browser to help debug and validate CSS, Cookies, Cache, Forms, Images, HTML, Frames and Links etc.
Great stuff check out at chrispederick.com/work/web-developer.
When it comes programming you need a source code editor and here is a free open source editor for number of programming languages and it has very useful features that help in opening files of various extentions and making quick changes there is a great alternative to default windows notepad, Notepad ++.
Notepad ++ supports number of languages and has lot of Code editing features comparable to other IDE's but for Free!!
Now once you have code, next challenge is with versions and comparisions. WinMerge is a Win32 tool for visual difference display and merging, for both files and directories. Unicode support. It is a great file/folder comparision tool and it is open source too.
Now the usual messing around the colors is a complex task. Here is a simple tool to help you pick exact color in either decimal or hex value to use in CSS or Html. Color Picker is a great tool for web designers and developers.
When it comes to source control, we microsoft guys have treditional ally Visual Source Safe. But in the new world of open source there are new options. Open source favourate CVS has got a new version which is Subversion.
SubVersion has been a silent revelution in the world of source control and now a dominent player.
Sub version comes with multi OS environments and has much more features than Source Safe. But the major difference is in the way it approaches versioning and checkin/check out mechanism.
Subversion works over HTTP/WebDev which makes it much superior to many other tools. On top of every thing it is for open source and free!
Though subversion can be used with command line client, to be realistic it needs a client tool yet again another open source software to use it which is Toirtoise SNV.
Tortoise SVN is a great Sub Version client which is implimented as windows shell extension. Yes the next immidiate question would be what about Visual Studio integration? yes there is another free pug in available which makes the total setup work almost like vss but with much more useful features.
This tool is called ankh and it provides most of the useful right click menu options to check out/get update, diff and commit etc.
