Procastination when moving from c# code to html/css/jquery

Question

I find when I writing non UI code on a project I can be relatively productive (working in a top down manner from the service layer), following a TDD approach, Im nearly always out of the debugger until integration, not perfect but happy enough. FYI, I work in C# with R# enabled in VS2008.

However when I switch to stick a web interface over something, Im terribly bad in hitting F5 making a few changes here and there in css/html, changing famfam icons, debugging in firebug, adding more jquery etc, etc. FYI, I work in ASP.Net where controller delegate most out to the service layer, using Viewmodels dedicated to the Views etc.. generally following clean mvc. Code in controllers is not TDD as I found its basically proxying to the service layer with a little mapping to/from viewmodels/formmodels so I've skipped over this portion.

Do developers that reach into the jquery/html/css area often have any tips to increase productivity and avoid procasination (e.g. here on SO now). This could equally apply to Java developers

Thanks

Answer 1

Nothing works better than strong coffee and Firebug with Firefox. Now even IE with reaching there with IE8.

I think most of the css/html thing should be delegated to the web designers, where build the frame for developer's to put the data objects into.

Answer 2

debugger != procrastination - when you're doing graphical stuff, you need to keep viewing the output.

Testing GUIs to conform with a spec is a known hard problem, and for most cases it's not worth the pain - human eye pattern matching is superior.

If you are designing distinct, specified behaviour with jquery, it is possible to do TDD to some extent - there is testing framework called QUnit. Have a look at Getting Started With jQuery QUnit for Client-Side Javascript Testing