CFEclipse Line Numbers Fix

One of the first things I noticed in CFEclipse was no line numbers. Thinking it was a simple configuration fix, I checked the preferences and saw that under Editors, there is a check for "show line numbers". I checked it and . . . voila nothing happened. I checked the documentation for CFEclipse, which is just a Wiki on the http://www.cfeclipse.org/ site and they said that there should be a check box for the same thing in the CFEclipse portion of the preferences. I checked. It wasn't there! After doing some research, here is what I found:

Show Line Numbers in CFEclipse:

1. First you have to go to your workspace directory which would've been the first thing to set when you started the application for the first time. To make matters easy just do a search for the word workspace from the root of your machine's hard drive. Mind you, I'm using Windows XP so you can make any adjustments to your own OS. The files are hidden so you'll have to enable viewing hidden files and directories.


2. Navigate in your directory to the following:
   .metadata\.plugins\org.eclipse.core.runtime\.settings\org.cfeclipse.cfml.prefs


3. Open the file with notepad or any plain text editor and add the following line:
   lineNumberRuler=true


4. Save everything. Close out everything and restart Eclipse. You should now see line numbers appearing in your code. Don't forget to re-enable hiding your hidden files.

Did this help you or did you get more frustrated? Let me know.

On Learning .NET after ColdFusion

I certainly don't claim to be a great programmer but I try. Not having an initial formal education in Computer Science can be a handicap at times but still you are given the chance to see programming from a more practical level than most with CS degrees. For one thing you are more focused on the results than on the process. I started out as a ColdFusion programmer in the mid to late 90s when the web was young and folks were beginning to come up with easy ways to add functionality to web pages. ColdFusion was very popular with this and for a time one could make some good money as a CF programmer. I had always been a computer enthusiast and caught the web bug when my friend Pete Tarnowsky introduced me to HTML. CF was easy because it used the same tag like structure as HTML so the progression was natural.

Well along came ASP for which you didn't need to buy the application server. All you needed was what was Internet Information Server or IIS and you had pretty much the basis of what you needed to get a dynamic website up and running. If you were a VB programmer, you could create objects that could interface with ASP. The expense of buying the CF app server was gone. That provided some stiff competition to CF and eventually there were more sites built with ASP. Java followed and things got even more complicated. CF's engine was eventually written with Java and evolved into the scenario where you were actually running a Java application through CF. They were trying to sell it as doing Java the easy way with ColdFusion.

As every programmer knows, one of the requirements is upgrading ones skill set. Only a fool would put all his programming eggs in one language. Unfortunately this happens no fault of the programmer as you can get stuck in one environment. Some times it takes the ultimate plunge, going it on your own, to acquire the skillset to make yourself continually marketable. This is what I did, ending up unemployed for a few months. The great thing is that I was able to use this time to get into .NET. I did work a tiny bit on .NET projects but to be honest I was just editing code, not adding major functionality.

What I found was by being just a little resourceful you could teach yourself .NET without spending an extra dime. One needs to only download the latest application IDEs from Microsoft which would include developer or Express versions of the major applications used in .NET development. You will need Visual Web Developer and MS SQL Server 2008 Express. All of this is available as a download. In addition, a good friend of mine gave me a pdf of the book Build Your Own ASP.NET 2.0 Web Site Using C# and VB by Christian Darie and Zak Ruvalcaba. Obviously I won't offer the pdf file but would encourage you to buy the actual book. Click on the link on this site. While you're at it just a reminder that you're actually supporting this blog when you buy from our sponsors so be sure to check out some of the goods and services being offered.

I intend to be finished with the book in 2 weeks and since many of the concepts I already know, particularly the sections on databases, I hope to move quickly. At the time of this writing, I noticed that there is an updated edition. Seems the names are switched around so that its authored by Zak Ruvalcaba and Christian Dairie instead of the other way around. Whatever it is, get the book. Like I said on Twitter, I hope to be the baddest .NET programmer around.