What are the tools you use every day… or at least on a very regular basis for web development? I sat down and made a list… leaving out the obvious Visual Studio and the stuff that was more specific to .NET (Reflector, windbg etc):

• IETester – great for testing display of different IE version without switching between 3 vms
• jsmin to minimize / combine javascript
• Firebug and/or IE8 developer tools… duh! Can’t get very far without one of those any more.
• IE7 developer tools – they tend to crash a lot on SlxWeb so I only use them when I need to troubleshoot an IE7-specific problem
• Sizer – very useful to see what the page looks like at various resolutions
• Fiddler – to snoop http… very neat
• Tamper Data – Firefox extension to troubleshoot HTTP headers etc, sometimes I use it instead of Fiddler, or when I am on Linux. Fiddler is a lot more user friendly but it does not let you edit the headers on the fly.
• Wireshark – a TCP capture tool… for when Fiddler is not enough! Thankfully I don’t have to use that one very often.
• ScreenRuler for Gnome: this is Linux-specific but I am sure Windows equivalents exist – it pops a virtual ruler on the screen. Very handy when trying to align controls

And a few others that are not strictly web tools, but still extremely useful in web development:

• KDiff3 – a diff tool. There are a number of other diff tools. WinMerge is a bit easier to use but I had trouble with some files with it (something to do with the newline styles, I think).
• Notepad2 – a notepad replacement with syntax highlighting and other features. I use it a lot to peek at source files because it loads about 1000 times faster than Visual Studio (and even a lot faster than Vim)
• Source control is a must: I use Git (actually msysgit, for Windows) for SlxWeb development and Subversion for most other projects. Subversion is a lot easier to use but does not work well for SlxWeb.
• VirtualBox – I tried VMWare and VirtualPC as well, but the free versions of VMWare are very limited, and I found VirtualPC to have very poor performance.

One missing feature of the SLX web client some of our users have been very vocal about is the ability to manage picklist options (multi-select, alphabetical sort, etc) from the good old picklist manager.  What makes it even more confusing is that there is no indication in the picklist manager that the options are not actually going to take effect… but in fact in the web client these options are only taken from the picklist control itself (i.e., set via the App Architect or in the page’s code). 

Fortunately it is a reasonably simple problem to resolve since those picklist options are readily accessible from the database.  All we have to do really is wrap the creation of the picklist control with something that will know how to pull that info and set it on the control.  The simplest way to do that would probably be to subclass the control, but I decided to go with a decorator pattern instead (the idea was that this would let me change a bit more of the behavior, for example, replace the stock picklist with a regular dropdown).  So instead of using:

<SalesLogix:PickListControl runat="server" ID="pklType" PickListName="Account Type" AutoPostBack="true"  AlphaSort="true" MustExistInList="true" AllowMultiple="true"  />

I use:

<SSS:SimplePickList runat="server" ID="pklType" PickListName="Account Type" AutoPostBack="true"   />

Behind the scene the SimplePicklist controls reads the attributes from the database and create a Saleslogix picklist control with the proper settings, something like this:

_picklist = new PickListControl();
if ((_storageMode & PicklistStorageMode.Id) != 0)
    _picklist.StorageMode = Sage.Platform.Controls.StorageModeEnum.ID;
else if ((_storageMode & PicklistStorageMode.Code) != 0)
    _picklist.StorageMode = Sage.Platform.Controls.StorageModeEnum.Code;
_picklist.PickListName = _picklistName;
_picklist.AllowMultiples = _attr.AllowMultiples;
_picklist.AlphaSort = _attr.AlphaSorted;
_picklist.NoneEditable = _attr.NoneEditable;
_picklist.Required = _attr.Required;
_picklist.MustExistInList = _attr.ValueMustExist;
_picklist.PickListValueChanged += delegate
{
    if (TextChanged != null)
        TextChanged(this, EventArgs.Empty);
};
parentControl.Controls.Add(_picklist);

This works fine for custom smart parts, how about for QuickForms?  Well, it is possible to change the template there too, but as it is global (will affect nearly every picklist in the client) it is a bit scarier

In the Model\QuickForms\Web\QFSLXPickList.WebControlRenderingTemplate.vm I changed the control to use my “SimplePickList” instead of a PickListControl

## Simple Picklist alternative (to automatically determine the sort etc)
    <SSS:SimplePickList Compatible="true" runat="server" ID="${qfcontrol.ControlId}" #if($qfcontrol.IsReadOnly)ReadOnly="true" #end
#if(!$qfcontrol.Enabled)Enabled="false" #end
#if($qfcontrol.ToolTip != "") ToolTip="<%$ resources: ${qfcontrol.ControlId}.ToolTip %>" #end
#if($qfcontrol.HotKey != "")AccessKey="$qfcontrol.HotKey" #end
#if($qfcontrol.PickListName != "")PickListName="$qfcontrol.PickListName" #end
#if($qfcontrol.HasActionCode || $qfcontrol.AutoPostBack)AutoPostBack="true" #end
#if($qfcontrol.Required)Required="true" #end
#if($qfcontrol.MaxLength > 0)MaxLength="$qfcontrol.MaxLength" #end
#if($qfcontrol.TabIndex > 0)TabIndex="$qfcontrol.TabIndex" #end
#if($qfcontrol.StorageMode != "Text")StorageMode="$qfcontrol.StorageMode" #end
#if($qfcontrol.StyleScheme != "")CssClass="$qfcontrol.StyleScheme" #end
#if(!$qfcontrol.Visible)Visible="false" #end  />

The “Compatible=true” setting is something I added to avoid bad surprises – it forces the list to display as a standard Saleslogix picklist, instead of e.g. a dropdown.

Now because it is a custom control, it requires a change to web.config too, something like this (under system.web/pages/controls):

<add tagPrefix="SSS" namespace="SSSWorld.Slx75.Web.Controls" assembly="SSSWorld.Slx75"/>

I think it works great, but haven’t tried on a production system yet – I am going to save it for a next big project when I can get a resource to QA the entire app!  I do already use the “small” version in production in my custom smart parts, though.  I saved the code under here, if interested feel free to rip it up (though it probably has some extra dependencies so it will require a bit of cleanup).

So although I think the PickListControl should support this out of the box it is nice to see that it is not too hard to add the functionality ourselves.