Professional in C# and Visual Basic Part 163. Building on the revolutionary release, adds several key new developer features including AJAX, LINQ, and a new CSS designer in Visual Web Developer 2008. The dramatic reduction in code that developers realized from the more than 50 new server controls in now allows developers the time to make their applications more interactive with AJAX, to work with data in their preferred language with LINQ, and to build visually attractive and consistent standards-based sites with CSS | Appendix B Ultimate Tools Figure B-3 IE WebDeveloper Toolbar and Firefox WebDeveloper Both of these toolbars are free and absolutely essential for Web development. The IE Web Developer Toolbar is from Microsoft and extends Internet Explorer with a docked Explorer Bar offering features such as DOM inspection and element outlining. You can edit the CSS and see what styles are applied to specific elements as seen in Figure B-4. Figure B-4 Firefox has a similar but even more powerful Web Developer Toolbar created by Chris Pederick. It takes a slightly different direction for its user interface by including a number of menus each literally chock full of menu options. You can disable cookies CSS images inspect elements form inputs and outline tables as shown in Figure B-5. 1586 Appendix B Ultimate Tools Figure B-5 developers today need their sites to look great in both browsers. These two toolbars put a host of usefulness at your fingertips. Highly recommended. 1587 Appendix B Ultimate Tools Aptana Studio Javascript IDE Aptana offers a pay-for Professional Edition and a Free Community Edition. It s a Web development environment based on the Eclipse codebase. It s not optimized for but it includes some amazing JavaScript-specific support that makes it worth looking at for AJAX or JavaScript heavy sites. One of Aptana s most compelling features is its understanding of browser compatibility of JavaScript properties and functions. Aptana s IntelliSense includes icons for the various browsers and dims them out appropriately for unsupported features for not only JavaScript but also HTML and CSS as well. The Professional Edition also includes a JSON JavaScript Object Notation editor with syntax highlighting for JSON datasets. This is a great feature if you re passing a large and deep dataset back and forth via AJAX. Aptana also includes all the major open source AJAX libraries such as Prototype and Scriptaculous as shown in Figure B-6. .
