Use Firebug for High Speed Development

The Firebug extension for Mozilla Firefox allows the debugging, editing, and modifying of any website's CSS, HTML, DOM, and JavaScript, and provides other web development tools.

(from wikipedia)

Firebug is really useful to me in web spider/crawler development. It makes writing regular expression easier & faster as I can put the mouse on specific portion of the web page and get it's code using inspect. Another useful feature for me is I can see all the http requests and responses, which also helps me a lot in writing web spiders.

You can get Firebug from getfirebug.com or download from addons.mozilla.org

Speed up your web development using Firebug!

SimpleXML - simple way to parse XML in PHP

This morning I needed to write a PHP script that parses an XML file. I could do it easily with regular expressions - as I can play very well with regexp :). But I was looking for an easier & simpler way to parse XML using PHP, as I thought there must be a very simple way. And I was right, I found SimpleXML. SimpleXML makes XML processing really simple. Here I give links of some excellent (and simple!) resources of SimpleXML:

• SimpleXML: A very well written and comprehensive article/tutorial.
• SimpleXML Functions: SimpleXML functions list with good examples from php.net
• PHP XML SimpleXML: w3schools tutorial.

SimpleXML will definitely speed up your XML processing speed!

C# Timer Control

In C#.NET, in order to do a certain task repeatedly after specific time interval you have to use the Timer control. Today I had to use it for a small project (to repeatedly send request to a web service). I just used Google and found some nice and easy articles. I think it's worth sharing couple of them to save your google time :)

• C# Timer Demo
• Working with Timer Control in C#

And of course you can look at MSDN (though sometimes I find it time consuming to learn something from MSDN).

W3Schools - quick way to get started with www technologies

If you are a student, or just started your programming career or a professional, you may need to get started with a certain web technology (HTML, XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, XML, AJAX etc.). And if you are running in short of time, you need a high speed introduction to those technologies. W3Schools can give you a quick start. It has many short tutorials on the following ares:

• HTML
• XML
• Browser Scripting
• Server Scripting
• Multimedia
• Web Building

I found many of them very useful for me. Hope you also will find the tutorials useful.

UnxUtil - Run Unix / Linux command in Windows

Life sucks when you are asked to make your script run in Windows, that you have written for Linux and that uses lots of Unix or Linux specific system commands :(

But there is a nice tool name UnxUtil that you can install on your windows and run Unix / Linux commands in the command line. UnxUtil will speed up your development by saving hours.

You can download it from here. After download, just extract it in a directory and add the PATH in your ENVIRONMENT VARIABLE (PATH) (Start -> Settings -> Control Panel -> System -> Advanced -> Environment Variables).

Thats all!