Why I don't use Dreamweaver - or How to lose 2 hours with a single character

I don't use Dreamweaver personally - I've used CFEclipse for pretty much all CF development since August 2004.

Some of my colleagues however (mainly those of a less code centric bent) do persist in using Dreamweaver - although after this fiasco, at least one of them may move over to CFEclipse.

A colleague asked for my assistance because Dreamweaver had crashed on his machine, and when he tried to reload it Dreamweaver would close immediately after displaying the splash screen.

I initially suspected that Dreamweaver's site cache may have become corrupt when Dreamweaver crashed, and that this might be preventing Dreamweaver from reloading. After a brief google, I found this adobe technote which gives instructions on diagnosing and fixing these kind of issues.

I started by deleting Dreamweaver's site cache - this was progress, as Dreamweaver now took slightly longer to crash, as it had to rebuild the site cache first.

I then renamed the key in the registry that Dreamweaver uses to store its site definitions. Dreamweaver now loaded without crashing.

I then restored the site definitions, and went through removing sites until I had identified which site had caused Dreamweaver to crash (Which not surprisingly was the one he had been working on before Dreamweaver crashed).

My colleague then attempted to recreate the site, but as Dreamweaver attempted to build the site cache, once again it crashed (although it did at least give a (meaningless) error message this time. Fortunately it did crash before saving the site definition - otherwise we would have had to delete the site from the registry again.

My colleague then tested creating another site, pointing to a different location, and had no problem in doing so. This suggested to me that there must be something in one of the files in the problem site that Dreamweaver did not like - possibly an invalid character in the middle of being written to a file when Dreamweaver crashed.

I then instructed my colleague to check all the files that had changed since last checkin - opening them individually to look for anything strange - strange characters, mid file truncation etc.

The 6th file he attempted to open, immediately caused Dreamweaver to crash.

So what, you may ask, was the problem with this file?

The file was a css file.

The invalid line:

So, there you go - inadvertently inserting a quote mid dimension in a css file, will cause Dreamweaver to go FooBar - and, because of the site cache, this will prevent you from opening the site at all!