Too helpful

Why does MS Visual Studio .NET 2003 think it's being helpful when it puts crappy default files into new projects?

Who wants an aspx page called webform1.aspx?

Or indeed a class called Class1.cs?

Clown shoes.

Firebug , Textmate and SciTE

Got the bug

Anyone with historical knowledge of this blog will know that I am fashionably late to this whole Javascript and DOM lark. The excellent Firebug has helped immeasurably. A nifty little Firefox addon, it offers the sort of debugging facilities you only normally find in an app-based IDE.

Breakpoints are one thing, but a console allowing you to echo anything in scope is the icing on the client-side cake. If you're at all serious about Javascript, you've probably got this installed already. If, like me, you're new to the party, Firebug will help you to get on that much better.

TextMate

My iMac has been woefully underused recently, and it's a shame, because as a development machine, it absolutely rocks ( in that 500Mhz sorta way ). Perl, Ruby and a bash shell all lie in wait for their master (relatively speaking) to return. I've even got compilers for C and C++. Woot!

TextMate is a lovely text editor for the Mac that handles pretty much all of these languages. It's helpful - it'll throw DOCTYPE declarations into markup and auto-close your parentheses and bracers for you. It even caters for those coders that are determined to type them anyway.

I'm a bit too sold on OO to be playing around with C like I used to, but I have been writing some C++ programs, and have loved it. If you're at all serious about coding on a Mac and don't wanna go the whole XCode route, TextMate is the biz, and well worth the 24UKP you'll end up paying for it.

SciTE

If you're away from a Mac or don't want to stump up the cash, SciTE is a wonder. Those who've got experience with the Ruby on Rails framework will probably have seen it in passing ( some of the tutorial pages on the web use SciTE screenies ). It's a great editor. You can get it here. If you're on Windows, I thoroughly recommend Bruce Dodson's installer with extensions.

Bovine economy

I've been playing with mootools recently. I like it for two reasons.

1. It makes Javascript programming easy and economical.
2. It has moo in its title.

Sam Birch has been evangelising the tech for some time, and on today's evidence, it's hard to knock back his enthusiasm.

I managed to trim a rather nasty set of Javascript functions into something resembling concise, lovely code.

Of course, Sam's interest in the technology is purely based around graphics whoring, but that's okay.

Only perceivable problems are that it's an extra library to download and interpret before processing actually begins, and that there is slightly more to learn. Won't lose sleep over either setback.