The new 2.0 release is fully compliant with Eclipse standards, enabling PHP developers to leverage a wide variety of Eclipse projects, such as Web Tools Project (WTP) and Dynamic Language Toolkit (DLTK), for faster and easier development. PDT 2.0 also offers strong support for Object Orient Programming (OOP) in PHP.

Some of the new capabilities in PDT 2.0 are:

• A Type Hierarchy view
• Mark Occurrences
• Indexing and caching of model elements
• And much, much more…

Download a copy >>

                        

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• My Essential Developer’s Toolbox – Part I

Open a file to work with and right click the line you want to place a bookmark on.

Enter your bookmark name.

Now you can select your bookmark from the bar on the right, directly to the right of the text editor. The small blue bar is clickable and will take you to the bookmark.

                        

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• My Essential Developer’s Toolbox – Part I

Read more at http://en.csharp-online.net/Visual_Studio_Web_Applications%E2%80%94Error_List_and_Task_List

                        

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• My Essential Developer’s Toolbox – Part I

Part I of the My Essential Developer’s Toolbox listed IDEs for ASP.NET, PHP, other open source technologies as well as Database Management applications for Microsoft SQL Server and MySQL. Click here to read the post.

Part II of the My Essential Developer’s Toolbox listed versioning apps, remote server communication apps, networking tools and text editors . Click here to read the post.

Browsers

Internet Explorer

Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=E59C3964-672D-4511-BB3E-2D5E1DB91038&displaylang=en
This is very similar to the Web Developer plugin for Firefox with mostly the same tools and features.

Fiddler
http://www.fiddlertool.com/fiddler/
This tool allows you to log the raw traffic that is sent to your Internet Explorer browser. Everything from HTTP headers to the post data is available with a large set of tools to help you find exactly what you are looking for.

MultipleIE
http://tredosoft.com/Multiple_IE
If you have Internet Explorer 7 installed you cannot use IE 6. With this tool you can overcome this drawback and run versions of IE as early as IE 3. Interesting to view your modern sites on the old browers.

NOTE: From forums I have read that MultipleIE still uses the IE 7 JavaScript rendering engine but I can’t confirm if that’s true. Any takers?

Firefox

Mozilla Firefox
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/
If you haven’t heard about Firefox by now you must have just been un-thawed from your 100 year cryochamber, “yeah baby”.

Firebug
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1843
If you need to find out what CSS class is applied to an element, HTML hiding in a part of a page, change your HTML on the fly, debug your JavsScript, then this is the tool to download. Once you have it you’ll wonder how you lived without it.

Web Developer Plugin
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/60
This is and Firebug are tied for being the most important plugins any web developer can have. It will allow you validate your HTML and CSS against the W3C validation engines, view information about everything regarding your pages, disable JavaScript, disable cookies, the list goes on and on.

Live HTTP Headers
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3829
This plugin is very similar to Fiddler for IE and has most of the same features and just like Fiddler can be called directly from the browser.

ColorZilla
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/271
This plugin is great for grabbing the HEX code for a part of a page you are looking at. After install click the color dropper icon in the bottom left, click the color you want to copy, right click the color dropper icon and select your option.

DownThemAll!
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/201
Great when you need to grab a number of files on one page all at once, instead of right clicking, save as. You can apply regular expression filters for file types that are not listed in the available file types. Huge time saver if you are migrating content from an old site to a new one for a client, especially if you don’t have FTP access.

FoxMarks
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2410
If you have ever been in the situation where you wish you had the same bookmarks on all your computers this plugin will take care of the syncronization. It even supports password sync for all of your saved passwords.

IE Tab
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1419
I try to keep as few applications open at the same time to keep my desktop clean. This plugin will allow you to switch between Firefox and IE with one mouse click. You can set filters to only use IE for certains sites as well as other options as well.

Website Utilities

HTTrack
http://www.httrack.com/
This application is useful in situations you need to copy a website, such as your client’s, and they no longer have FTP access or you need an HTML version of your dynamic site.

Xenu
http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html
Find your 404 pages and where the links are coming from with this tool.

Zoom Indexer – Commerical
http://www.wrensoft.com/zoom/
This application will allow you to create a web site search page that can track searches, display featured links, set weight on certain types of content, create Google XML sitemaps and index offline files such as PDF, doc, txt, xls and more.

SiteUptime – Free – Premium
http://www.siteuptime.com/
This website will track your website uptime and report when there are outages. The free account will track one website, you will need to purchase a premium account to track more sites or if you need more frequent monitor intervals.

BK ReplaceEM
http://www.softpedia.com/progDownload/BK-ReplaceEm-Download-44103.html
This isn’t really a website utility but is great when you need to change some code across multiple files at once.

Website Security

HP Scawler
https://download.spidynamics.com/products/scrawlr/
This tool will help you find any obvious SQL Injection vulnerabilties for a query string based web site. By that I mean if your site uses the old standard for sending values to your application, ie. page.aspx?id=1234. It does not work on sites that use rewriting and hides the query string, ie. /page/1234. Remember to always use parameters or escape your values.

HTACCESS Generator
http://tools.dynamicdrive.com/password/
This site will create the .htaccess and .htpasswd information you need to password protect a folder on a Unix or Linux server. I will write a post on how to create an .htaccess and .htpasswd pair for Windows servers.

                        

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• How to Download an Entire Web Page Screenshot

If you missed Part I of the My Essential Developer’s Toolbox I listed some IDEs for ASP.NET, PHP, other open source technologies as well as Database Management applications for Microsoft SQL Server and MySQL. Click here to read the post.

Versioning

If you are not familiar with versioning it’s a process of keeping track of changes you have made to files over time. You start with a base repository and when you make changes you can commit the changes to the repository so that you can review what updates have been made over time. Versioning will help if you need to revert to an old version of your code for a specific file or group of files.

I will write a post up on how to use versioning in the near future.

SVN 1-Click Setup
http://svn1clicksetup.tigris.org/
Thanks to Tigris group for putting this application together. When SVN was first introduced to Windows you had to use Instrsrv.exe and Srvany.exe to create and install a custom service to run SVN server as a service for Windows. But with SVN 1-Click Setup it’s as easy as installing any other application. It will also install TortoiseSVN, the integrated SVN Windows client, and configure the server. Which brings us too…

TortoiseSVN
http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/
This is bridge from Windows Explorer and the SVN Server. You can create and manage repositories directly from Windows Explorer.

ExamDiff
http://www.prestosoft.com/ps.asp?page=edp_examdiff
The simple interface that ExamDiff uses makes it easy to find diffs for select files. It has a large list of options ranging from filtering, changing the orientation of the windows, searching and much more.

Remote Server Communication

FileZilla FTP Client
http://filezilla-project.org/
This is one tool anyone who transfers files to an FTP server can’t live without. It’s a great free ftp client that has all of the bells and whistles the commercial applications have at the price we love, FREE. It will support every type of FTP protocol including SFTP.

There is also a great FTP server FileZilla provides but is for Windows server only at the moment.

WinSCP
http://winscp.net/
If you need to comminicate to an SSH server or transfer files via SCP this is the tool to use. Great interface and even comes with PUTTY if you need to get access to shell. It will also support SFTP.

PUTTY
http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/
This super small tool allows Windows clients to access SSH and telnet servers with one application. Does not require installation so it can be ran directly from a USB drive.

Networking Tools

WireShark
http://www.wireshark.org/

This tool is great when you need to review the traffic from your server to the client. You may encounter situations that requires you to verify the raw text that is being transmitted for security reasons or to figure out why you are not getting what you expect from your web application.

Text Editors

Notepad++
http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm

This is my favorite text editor. Especially when you need to make quick changes to files without having to open up your IDE. It supports tabs, syntax highlighting for a large number of languages such as C#, ASP, ASP.NET, PHP, Perl, CSS, HTML, JavaScript, XML and much more. Also has code folding and a multitude of macros to convert your file to a different format, change line terminators and more. Highly suggest this application to everyone.

Continued

Read on to Part III of the My Essential Developer’s Toolbox series of posts.

                        

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• No Related Post

IDEs (Integrated Development Environment)*

Microsoft ASP.NET

Both of the IDEs below are top notch and my personal favorites for developing against Microsoft technologies. Both have incredible built in debuggers including JavaScript debugging, drag and drop Web Control functionality, direct SQL Server support, source control support, ASP.NET AJAX integration, the list goes on. Click on the links below to view a full feature list.

Microsoft Visual Web Developer – Free
http://www.microsoft.com/express/vwd/

Microsoft Visual Studio
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/products/default.aspx

PHP, Perl, Ruby, Java and Other Open Source Technologies

There are a lot more open source and commercial IDEs available for the Open Source technologies that are not listed here and quick search on Google will help if you are looking for something in particular.

I only develop against PHP in the Open Source space so I will list PHP IDEs that I use.

Eclipse PDT Project – Free – Cross Platform
http://www.eclipse.org/pdt/
This is an incredible Open Source (free) project that will give most developers just about every feature you will need. The one thing I must mention about Eclipse is that it is has a huge list of plugins that extend it’s base functionality from integrated database support, just about every programming language support, integrated remote server clients and much more.

EasyEclipse – Free – Cross Platform
http://www.easyeclipse.org/site/home/index.html
Similar to Eclipse PDT but with the most common used plugins already installed. The base Eclipse version may be behind from the latest version.

Zend Studio Professional for Eclipse – Cross Platform
http://www.zend.com/en/products/studio/
My experience with Zend Studio Professional for Eclipse has been mixed. It has all of the base functionality as the Eclipse PDT project (which a lot of Zend Studio is based on) as well as hooks into their proprietary products such as Zend Core and includes support for the PHP/Java bridge.

I love the extra functionality Zend Studio for Eclipse comes with that Eclipse PDT doesn’t have but it is slower and more buggy (crashes and constant workspace builds that run forever). Beyond a few bugs I encounter on a regular basis I believe it is worth the cost of a license since you do get support directly from Zend, a lot of incredible functionality and regular updates from Zend.

Aptana – Free – Cross Platform
http://www.aptana.com/
This is my favorite Eclipse plugin that can also be installed as a stand-alone application. I originally used this plugin for it’s excellent support for HTML, CSS and JavaScript but over time they have included some great tools such as their Jaxer Server and Aptana Cloud. If you are a Zend Studio user you will love the improvement of HTML, CSS and JavaScript support this plugin has over the built in tools. This plugin does support several other languages.

Database Management

Microsoft SQL Server

SQL Server Management Studio Express – Free
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=C243A5AE-4BD1-4E3D-94B8-5A0F62BF7796&displaylang=en
This is a great tool to management your SQL Server Express installation. This is a nice addition by Microsoft since the old Express version (MSDE, equivalent to SQL Server 2000) did not come with any managment software.

The biggest drawback to this is it does not have any direct method to backup or export all of your database data. I suggest grabbing a copy of the SQL Server Toolkit and use DTS to handle that or use the tool available from Peter A. Bromberg.

SQL Server Management Studio
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms174173.aspx
This is the full version of the SQL Server tools and has everything you need to manage your SQL Server data. A copy usually comes with a full version of Visual Studio.

MySQL

MySQL GUI Tools – Free
http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/gui-tools/5.0.html
MySQL has provided some basic tools to handle your MySQL installation from server and resource management to a query tool. Very handy but very basic as well. Does not include methods for direct export or import of data.

Navicat – Cross Platform
http://www.navicat.com/
This is the best MySQL management tool I have used. Very straight forward interface with everything you need at your fingertips. Has many data management tools with the ability to import, export, migrate data to and from other MySQL servers, schedule backups, create reports and much more. This is another commercial application that is worth the cost of the license.

They also provide versions for Oracle and PostgreSQL.

Glossary*

IDE
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_development_environment

Continued

Read on to Part II of the My Essential Developer’s Toolbox series of posts.

                        

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