Ed's Thread

As stated earlier I am just getting back into the development world, so what I consider new may be old hat to you. Be that as it may I have came across several new tools I want to share with you.

First is Visual Studio Express from Microsoft. This free but somewhat limited set of tools is continuing the trend in Microsoft development tools started by FrontPage and Visual Interdev. The Visual Web developer Studio is petty robust and can handle ASP pages along with straight HTML work. It is easy to use and comes with a great deal of tutorials and help.

Next is Windows Live Writer from Microsoft. This post is being created on the Live Writer beta. The beta bring a host of functionality for a great price:"free". It gives you the functionality of a WYSWYG editor that will post to  your blog on many of the available platforms. It includes spell check which is a great tool for me. You might want to give this one a try.

Now we get away from Microsoft with the Netbeans IDE. This is a fairly new product put under the GPL license by Sun Microsystems. I am just beginning to explore the possibilities but, I find them exciting based upon my leaning toward JAVA as my first choice in programming languages.

Next up is another Sun product the JAVA Studio Creator. In order to et this one you have to be a member of the Sun Developers Network, which is free and brings many other benefits. The Studio creator makes JSP pages and other JAVA application programming accessible to beginners while at the same time supporting the needs of more advanced developers.

I hope that these tools are as useful to you as I find hem and look forward to reading your views on them