I’ve been slowly building a new version of this website, to replace wordpress (and its attendant problems and constant updates) with something a little lighter that I control more tightly (I’m not just rolling my own blog engine, but a platform for several other things I have planned). As I’ve done so, I’ve been rethinking a lot of my approaches to software development for personal projects (corporate projects are a different matter and under different constraints). Given the ever-accelerating rate at which frameworks change, especially client-side javascript frameworks, I’ve had to more carefully assess the risk of major breaking changes and attempt to mitigate those as I switch things over. I’m currently building a fairly lightweight blog editor that allows me to create new blogposts using markdown and publish the rendered HTML in the actual blog itself. None of it is rocket science, but there are a lot of little things to think through. Perhaps one of the biggest things I’ve noticed is how different frameworks deal with extensibility versus ease of initial setup. I’m going to use javascript frameworks as an example of the sort of design decisions I’m dealing with, because it often seems to be the worst offender for me, although it’s likely that much of the difficulty I have on occasion will go away once I’m a little closer to a decade of solid javascript usage (I really only started using javascript heavily in the early days of jquery, although I used it under duress all the way back). While I was originally a fan of larger, more comprehensive systems, such as AngularJS because they handled much of the internals of the front end of the application, I’ve since started to move away from such systems precisely because they attempt to handle the internals of so much of the front end all in one place.

Web Essentials, by Mads Kristensen (and many others now, thanks to having been open-sourced) is hands-down my favorite free Visual Studio add-in (the winner in the paid category is Resharper). There are a lot of big features in the tool that make it an awesome add-in, most of which have been covered in other blogs. However, for myself, it’s the little features that make the most difference. It removes more frustration from my day when a tool saves me 10 or 15 seconds here and there than it does when it saves me five minutes (although five minutes is great too, but the smaller tasks are something I notice more frequently). So, here are my top 10 things I’ve noticed in the web essentials tooling that make my day a little easier:

’ve been developing in JavaScript for a long time and have seen client side techniques evolve drastically over that time. However, I have to say right now is about the most frustrating (and promising) time to be working with JavaScript in a professional capacity that I’ve seen in many years (and possibly ever). Let’s do a little retrospective of what I recall from back when I started really getting into computers.