MSDN Magazine - February 2008 - (Page 11) Powerful Text Editing, Web Testing in .NET, Extended Unit Testing, and More JAMES AVERY Edit Well with E Text Editor A good text editor is an essential tool for every programmer. A programmer’s choice of text editor is also one of the more frequent debates you will hear in the halls of conferences and workplaces. TextMate, a Mac OS X text editor, has quickly risen to popularity on that platform based on its ease of use and powerful extensibility capabilities. E Text Editor is a new text editor that tries to bring that same simplicity and powerful extensibility to the Windows® platform. E Text Editor lays a solid foundation with easy-to-use and simple text editor functionality. The program provides you with the ability to open multiple files at a time using tabs in a similar manner to the tabbed browsing format offered in many browsers. It also offers a project pane that provides you with a directory structure view of a given directory. In the example screenshot, I have an ASP.NET Web application folder open, and you can see each of the different directories and files (including the correct icons). The project pane makes it very easy to move around between directories and files in your project. E Text Editor extensibility is centered on the concept of bundles, which provide a way to include specific functionality for various programming languages without increasing the bloat of the native application, similar to plug-ins or add-ins in other software. By default, E Text Editor includes bundles for the majority of languages any Microsoft developer is going to be looking for, including C, C#, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, XML, and more. The one language that appears to be missing is Visual Basic® .NET. However, E Text Editor includes the functionality to create your own bundles, so maybe someone will create and publish a Visual Basic .NET bundle soon. Bundles can include a number of different features, the first of which is text completion. Unfortunately, this is not the text completion you’ll find in IntelliSense® in Visual Studio®, but rather it is text completion based on a certain set of keystrokes (similar to code snippets in Visual Studio). For example, in the C# bun- E Text Editor Offers Simple Text-Editing Functionality dle there is a text completext editors, and I fully expect to hear it tion setup that lets you quickly declare mentioned in the next text editor debate a new namespace by typing “ns” and that I encounter. then clicking the tab key. You can create Price: $34.95. a new property by typing prop and then www.e-texteditor.com tab and so forth. Each bundle contains text completions that are specific to the Create Functional Web App Tests language the bundle is written for. Bundles also contain formatting rules Unit testing can go a long way to helping avoid the testing and re-testing of an apfor their particular language. When you plication, but unit tests usually test the open a new file, you will see in the botlayers and objects behind an application tom middle of the status bar the format and not the application itself. All of your type being used for the document. For unit tests might pass, but there might instance, opening a C# document will be an error on your ASP.NET page or in show C# in the toolbar and provide C# your Windows Forms code that wasn’t syntax highlighting and formatting. You covered by your unit tests. can click on the format in the status bar Watin, which stands for Web to change how the document should be Application Testing in .NET, was inspired formatted. This is important, as certain by Watir, a similar open source framefiles can be viewed in different formats. For example, you could have an .html file work written in Ruby. Watin is an open source tool that can be used to write that could be ASP, ASP.NET, or another tests directly against your Web applicaWeb framework. Choosing the correct format will not only give you the best syn- tions. Tests written in this way are called functional tests since they are testing tax highlighting and formatting but will the functionality of your application as also enable the text completions availopposed to a single unit of code, such as able in that bundle. with unit tests. E Text Editor is a great new option in february2008 11 http://www.e-texteditor.com
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