The TSW Blog

One thing that I always felt could use some improvement in WebCoder, is the project to FTP synchronization feature. With the latest version it became pretty good, but I was never fully satisfied. When I started to work with ASP.NET besides PHP, I really missed an application for doing complete site synchronization, beyond what I ever imagined implementing in WebCoder. I started working on "TSW SiteSync" a couple of months after I began creating WebCoder 2007, and it quickly reached a point where I saw some real potential in it. The idea of an external application, which could be used with or without WebCoder, seemed like a really good idea, so that's what I did. TSW SiteSync will be an individual product, with the possibility of synchronizing WebCoder projects very easily. It will be a cheap product, with a price somewhere near the current price of WebPad.NET, with a substantial discount for people purchasing both WebCoder 2007 and SiteSync.

So, what do you think? Have you ever needed a good application for synchronizing your websites? Did you ever think that the built-in sync options in WebCoder needed a bit more features? Feedback is more than welcome, as are questions. If you're interested, I'll be happy to post some more information about SiteSync, along with the first screenshots of it :)

With WebPad.NET, we introduced a new way of using the internal preview of the editor. For the first time the good old "Edit - Preview - QuickEdit" tabs were gone, and replaced with a more flexible model, where the preview windows could be anywhere, and visible while editing. I think that this worked out well for a lot of people, and I also think that WebPad.NET was the right place to introduce this. However, WebCoder is an "old" application, with lots of users and traditions, and to be honest, I was afraid to make this change for "WebCoder.NET" too :). The obvious choice seemed to be to make this as an option, so that's what I did. On the first screenshot, you saw the WebPad.NET inspired interface which is default, with the preview browsers placed in tool windows. I promised you some more screenshots, so here is one with the "old style" interface, and just for fun, on Windows Vista, so you can see how it looks there as well :)

As always, enjoy, and let me know what you think. Do you guys want more screenshots? Any specific parts or functionality? Requests are welcome :)

Post number 10 in the "WebCoder.NET" series - almost like an anniversary, huh? :). First of all, I would like to reveal the name of "WebCoder.NET", because yes, there is a reason for the quotes around the name. "WebCoder.NET" was simply a codename for the .NET version of WebCoder - the real name will be TSW WebCoder 2007. I really couldn't hold on to that piece of information any longer, since every part of WebCoder uses this name, and since I promised you the very first screenshot of the application in this post, it wouldn't be a secret for long :). So without further ado, here it is for the first time - TSW WebCoder 2007:

Please, let me know what you think :). I will try to post a couple of screenshots more soon!

Ever since the first version of WebCoder, a modified document has been indicated by a red cross. WebCoder has been using a tab or tab-looking interface ever since the beginning. Tabs were really made popular when the browsers began offering tabbed browsing, but they introduced another standard as well: The cross on each tab, used for closing the tab it self. Some people may have been confused that the cross in WebCoder and WebPad.NET showed the modification status instead of acting as a close button - I got at least one complaint about it with WebPad.NET. Therefore, I'm trying something different with "WebCoder.NET" - using the font color of the tab instead. It looks like this:

I have been working with it like this for months now, and I actually prefer it now. Hopefully you will like it as well, and hopefully less people will be confused about it :)

Okay, so this post was not as exciting as some of the other posts, but don't go away just yet - the next post will contain the first published screenshot of "WebCoder.NET" ever, along with another interesting piece of information. Stay tuned! :)

One thing that you learn when creating a web editor is the fact that every person has their own style when it comes to writing a HTML tag. As a person who spends of time writing way more strict programming languages, as well as writing code for parsing HTML tags, I'm not very fond of the lose nature of HTML. Fortunately, XHTML is more strict when it comes to how your tags should be written, which makes it easier to parse, but since people still write standard HTML as well, WebCoder needs to support this too. However, supporting it is not always enough. WebCoder can output HTML in all sorts of ways, but in previous versions, the output was styled the way I preferred it - tags and attributes in lowercase and doublequotes surrounding all values. That was the way the dialogs outputted HTML, the way the IntelliSense features would output it, and so on. 

With WebCoder.NET, this has all changed. You may now decide casing for tags and attributes, as well as the quotes you may or may not wish to use for values. Almost a 1.000 lines of code in "WebCoder.NET" has been dedicated to the handling, parsing and outputting of HTML tags, which will ensure a more consistent input and output. The really cool part is that the HtmlTag class is used in all XML/Scripting dialogs too, and you may use it in your own scripts as well! This means that you can write scripts which outputs tags just the way the user wants it. This make generating HTML tags much cleaner - just look at the following example where we build an HTML tag, and then insert it into the currently active document:

from TSW.WebCoder.Classes import HtmlTag

tag = HtmlTag("div")
tag.AddAttribute("class", "testClass")
tag.AddAttribute("style", "text-align: center;")

tag.PhpEscapeOutput = False

ScriptUtils.InsertCode(tag.GetMarkup(True))

It's all very simple and quite nice to look at, I think. Once the GetMarkup() method is called, WebCoder formats the tag according to your tag settings, and return the tag just the way you want it. It's one of those minor things which makes me love "WebCoder.NET" a lot more :)