Kevin Isom

I have mentioned previously some useful tools for web development for IE, and now here are a couple more.

DOM Helper

This allows you to edit the css of a page much like EditCSS for Firefox

Fiddler

From the site

"Fiddler is a HTTP Debugging Proxy which logs all HTTP traffic between your computer and the Internet. Fiddler allows you to inspect all HTTP Traffic, set breakpoints, and "fiddle" with incoming or outgoing data. Fiddler includes a powerful event-based scripting subsystem, and can be extended using any .NET language."

A cool feature of Fiddler is the ability to write extensions for it. Definitely worthy looking into

Delicious

And not development related but damn useful (finally) is the Delicious plugin for IE. I have a tonne of bookmarks, keeping them synced between browsers and machines used to be a nightmare. Now I just use Delicious for IE and Firefox on all my machines and my problem is solved....Now if I could just cull some of my 2456 links I have saved I'd be alright.

How often have you seen code like this?

   1:  string myAppSetting = ConfigurationManager.AppSetting["key"];

   2:  if(myAppSetting==null)

   3:       myAppSetting = "MyDefaultSetting"

Or worse yet not even do the check, then during the deploy process the appsetting doesn't get copied over to the instance and you get a null reference exception. That is not a good look.

That sucks. But is preventable in code. That's when the null coalescing operator(??) comes in handy.

Example:

   1:  string myAppSetting = 

   2:            ConfigurationManager.AppSetting["key"] ?? "MyDefaultSetting"

   1:  Dim myAppSetting As String = IIf(ConfigurationManager.AppSetting("key") Is Nothing, _

   2:  "MyDefaultSetting", ConfigurationManager.AppSetting("key"))