Software Development Assistant

ASP.NET

This has to be the first port of call for help using ASP.NET. The site has a large number of tutorials and videos, but is difficult to use as some tutorials and videos are not up to date. So note carefully which version of ASP.NET they refer to.

Goto the Learn menu and then select Web Forms or MVC to access the pluralsight videos and tutorials. You can also get help on installing Microsoft applications.

Adobe TV

Adobe have video tutorials on all their many products including Dreamweaver CS5.5. The tutorials range from basic to advanced, however the My Library feature works very poorly as does the idea of channels.

Allway Sync

This is one of the best free tools for ensuring that you can keep two or more copies of your files in sync easily. It does however have a limit of no more than 20,000 fles per month.

Colour Scheme Designer

This website offer facilities for selecting a base colour, and getting a set of compatible colours, which can be then adjusted by brightness and contrast.

There a six colour schemes such as mono offering a set of 5 colours which are variations on the original, to compliment which offers a further five contrasting colours which blen together well. The colour number is found by hovering over the selected colour, not as easy to use as displaying the colour numbers.

ColorZilla: CSS3 Gradient Generator

This website offer facilities for generating CSS styles to create gradient fills in a variety of colours and types. Code is generated to cover all browsers including earlier versions of IE. This saves a lot of time compared to generating gradient images in Photoshop.

Can I Use HTML5 and CSS3 Features in my browser?

This website offer facilities for checking which features of HTML5 and CSS3 work in which browser. Browsers also include all mobile browsers, IOS, IE, Blackberry and Android.

DebugBar IE Tester

DebugBar offers features to aid debugging web pages in Internet Explorer similar to Firebug. The site also offers a free Tester which can show you how your web pages will look in versions of IE from 5.5 to 10.0

DropBox

DropBox is a free facility that enables you access to your files and shared files over the Internet. Download and install it at home, and the files will be automatically kept in sync. Your files can be shared to selected people.

Favicon Generator

Generates all the icons needed from a square image idealy greater than 260 x 260 pixels. For ASP.NET websites just replace the favicon.ico file, and clear browser cache before testing.

Firebug

An essential tool that assists in debugging web pages particularly if they include JavaScript.

HTML5 Boilerplate

HTML5 Boilerplate is the professional base HTML/CSS/JS template for a fast, robust and future-proof site. After more than three years in iterative development, you get the best of the best practices baked in: cross-browser normalization, performance optimizations, even optional features like cross-domain Ajax and Flash. A starter apache .htaccess config file hooks you the eff up with caching rules and preps your site to serve HTML5 video, use @font-face, and get your gzip zipple on. Boilerplate is not a framework, nor does it prescribe any philosophy of development, it's just got some tricks to get your project off the ground quickly and right-footed.

HTML5 Doctor

An excellent reference site on the HTML5 tags, with good examples and articles showing how best to use HTML5. The authors of one of the leading books on HTML5, Bruce Lawson and Remy Sharpe contribute to this site.

The HTML5Test

If you want to know exactly which parts of HTML5 your browser supports, then goto this page. You can see that IE9 scores only 141 points out of 475, whereas Firefox 7 scores 315, and Chrome comes top with 374

Learnable

Learnable is an offshoot of Sitepoint and has a wide range of online courses, including courses on HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, Web Design, Web Mobile, PHP and WordPress. They cost $17/month for any two courses.

Lynda.com

This site offers over 44 "courses" on Dreamweaver, each course being on average 2-3 hours of video. There are over 300 courses on Adobe Software in total. Costs are $25/month.

Lorum Ipsum

A site that provides placeholders paragraphs of latin text. Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s. It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout. The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using 'Content here, content here', making it look like readable English.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Proin porta posuere tellus. Praesent sed metus vitae turpis viverra volutpat fringilla sed lorem. Fusce condimentum urna sit amet magna pretium vitae facilisis sapien condimentum. Mauris massa nulla, porttitor at malesuada sit amet, aliquet sed dolor. Pellentesque at turpis tellus. Suspendisse at metus nisl. Vestibulum a viverra lectus. Praesent eget massa in sapien euismod aliquet. Class aptent taciti sociosqu ad litora torquent per conubia nostra, per inceptos himenaeos. Nullam faucibus ipsum ut urna accumsan et elementum justo sollicitudin. Integer vel nunc velit, ac pulvinar erat. Nulla tempus leo sed arcu bibendum in sagittis turpis auctor. Ut at metus est. Quisque nec orci velit. Proin vitae risus nibh, ac aliquet dui.

Online Image Editor

A website that provides simple image editing including making backgrounds transparent, even in animated gifs.

Placehold.it

A site that provides image placeholders of any size. The placeholders can be annotated with additional text

Sass

Sass is a meta-language on top of CSS that?s used to describe the style of a document cleanly and structurally, with more power than flat CSS allows. Sass both provides a simpler, more elegant syntax for CSS and implements various features that are useful for creating manageable stylesheets.

Sitepoint

A good reference site for articles, forums, resources and books on HTML, CSS, JavaScript PHP and jQuery

Software4Students

The cheapest place to purchase Dreamweaver when used for educational purposes.

TinyMCE

A large number of web applications need to offer users the ability to create documents with simple formatting. HTML editors can provide a design view approach to creating a formated web page for documentation purposes.

TinyMce is used by Microsoft, WordPress, Facebook and Oracle. It can be used by simply linking a web page to their JavaScript libraries, and then any <textarea> will be turned into an HTML editor window.

Treehouse

This site offers video tutorials on HTML, CSS, Web Design and Web Development. Although most of the HTML videos are free, the css videos are not availble without payment. The HTML videos offer good clear explanations of most of the important HTML tags (but not the HTML5 tags)

W3C

The definitive source that controls the standards for building and rendering web pages including HTML, CSS, SVG, Ajax. The site also offers validators to test whether web pages are compatible with the defined standards for any version of HTML. It has 322 Members which include Adobe, Microsoft, Sony, Google, Yahoo, University of Oxford.

w3schools

A good source of reference for all the HTML tags, and CSS. Not however kept up to data in terms of HTML5 and browser compatibility.

Web Design for Developers

A useful website for selecting a set of compimentary colours. It has a set of 7 different colour schemes which can be used to select a set of colours based on a chosen base colour. Saturation and brightness can be adjusted, and all the colour numbers in the displayed colour pallet are clearly shown and can easily be copied into style sheets.

WestCiv

Some useful tools in particular the CSS Sandbox, together with other resources on CSS

WinHost

An american web hosting service that specialises in ASP.NET hosting. ValerianSoftware.com and my WordPress blogsite are hosted on this site.

A basic web hosting only costs $4.95/month and offers the very latest version of ASP.NET, as well as database servers (Access, SQL Server, MYSQL) and content management systems such as WordPress and Joomla. ASP.NET 4.5 and MVC 4 are suported as well as PHP 5.