Over the last few years I have been focusing on C# and a little Java but after finally getting Uni out of the way i have decided to have a look back at web development.

Browser Support

One of the things that I found to be a useful discovery was the tools available in Firefox. A good example is if you right click on the page and click “Inspect Element(0)” it will bring up a panel telling you the css styles that have been applied. Prehaps the best part of this tool is that you can untick each CSS rule and it will show the effect on the page.

Expression Web 4

This is the first time i have not reached for Dreamweaver as the IDE for web but instead i have been trying out Expression Web 4. I admit to being surpised by Expression Web considering that all i was excepted was FrontPage with a new name. A useful tool that comes with the Expression Studio is the SuperPreview which allows you to view the site in multiple diffrent browsers so you can compare the diffrence.

Its rather frustrating that the only remote source control that was supported from what i could tell was using Microsoft’s very own Team Foundation Server.

TurnKey Linux

Source: http://www.linuxjournal.com/files/linuxjournal.com/ufiles/TurnKey%20WordPress-2010-04-27-10-35-49.png

One of the first things I did was to sort out a local server so I didnt have to keep uploading to the web. I wanted to avoid using XAMPP because I didnt really want it running on my laptop. The solution I went for was running a virtual machine in VirtualBox running a stripped down linux LAMP setup. Firstly i tried Ubuntu server but gave up on that while trying to setup a network conneciton. I then tried TurnKey and was rather impressed, I downloaded the LAMP system image and within minutes I had an up and running web server and the best part is that it only uses 1GB of storage space which is ideal considering im using  a rather limited 128GB SSD.

Also by only running two commands (thanks to admins-eHow ) I was able to hook the server to a VPN.

I will be sure to write a post in the near feature about my exprience with using a PHP framework for the first time.