Laurent Bugnion, Microsoft MVP, was recently interviewed during edition 26 of the popular show Herding Code. The initial focus of the interview was on the transition between SilverLight and WPF; Laurent explained how to approach the transition both from a learning perspective and from a practical hands on perspective. Then they discussed Silverlight offline and which scenarios are interesting and then moved to a discussion between WPF or WinForms; very interesting perspective. At 44:07 in the podcast Aggiorno was mentioned as a tool that is able to understand really bad HTML and then can help to easily clean it up all integrated with Visual Studio.
This week, Herding Code Edition 27 broadcasted a show named "What Every Web Developer Needs To Know" where Aggiorno is reviewed in depth. Below I have extracted a few comments that caught my attention from the podcast, but I strongly suggest you listen to the complete show.
It looks like many web developers do not really understand even basic HTML. It is very important for web developers to know HTML so that they are not creating a mess in their pages. Writing good markup is even important for intranet not only for outward customer facing apps. If you write good markup your chances of improved cross-browser compatibility is a lot higher, there is a big maintenance improvement (lower cost!!!), better search engine optimization, faster rendering, savings in bandwidth and it even improves the ability of designers and developers to work on the same document thanks to the separation between style and content.
A lot of time web professional spend time to make it render but do not really think about usability. It is really important to clarify what does it mean to have a web page DONE. Does it render on multiple browsers? Is it usable? Is it secure? These factors make a difference in terms of the quality of the final product.
What tools are key in the web development space? Firebug, a good text editor, a good wyswyg editor, W3C HTML validation and Aggiorno a refactoring tool for HTML (Re-Sharper for HTML??); Aggiorno is a much better tool for editing HTML. Beyond Find & Replace. Aggiorno helps with semantization of HTML and separation between content and style, the validation and fixing of poorly written background and in general it increases the productivity of the HTML editor. Additionally, Aggiorno is an extensible platform and many more cool features will come out in the near future.
As for my take from the podcast, Aggiorno is pictured as a really interesting tool for the web professional that needs to create and maintain markup (any web professional should be able to do it). Additionally, Aggiorno Standalone includes all the power of Aggiorno together with a full HTML editor (both text and visual) providing a lot of power in just one integrated tool.
On the other hand, the podcast also goes over the need for web developers to know regular expressions. They agree they are useful, but they also agree that they can easily become cumbersome. Aggiorno, with its Smart Search and Replace feature, really helps you here. You can now write patterns that understand your HTML markup and are very powerful and easier to use than a regex.
Try Aggiorno today and let us know if you agree with the guys from Herding Code!
