Fixing the Dreamweaver 8 bug on Macintosh

I use Dreamweaver 8 on a regular basis and though I’ve heard the rumors of bugs in this version, I hadn’t experienced how pesky Dreamweaver bugs could be until just before the start of this semester when Dreamweaver 8 decided to get a little crazy. Initially it started as a javascript error that came up on start up along with many other error messages. I did a lot of research and found this great article about DW8 javascript error on start up featured on Communitymx.com. It was very in depth and offered great guidance for PC users, but didn’t give much detail to help Macintosh users debug this issue.

As I continued to research the solution to this problem I stumbled across this Tech note offered by Adobe. The Technote lists a number of steps to take, to include installing the update to Dreamweaver 8. The update helped get rid of the start up javascript error, but many other errors followed. All the other help I found on the technote seemed pretty vague. Talk about frustrating!

So after reading all of the resources, one consistent thing I found was that it was recommended to delete a temporary file for Dreamweaver 8 with the extention .dat. Now if you’re like me – you might be hesitant to delete files in your application folders. Don’t stress, it’s a lot simpler to fix this problem than you might think.

Now the first thing to know is that on macintosh there are two main library folders. One refers to the library for the entire computer, and the other is contained in the user’s folder. So here’s where you need to go:

user > library > application support > Macromedia > Dreamweaver 8 > Configuration > .dat file (mine was named MacFileCache-30AD751B.dat)

.dat files are basically files that contains data for the program, my guess is that the file some how became corrupt. Delete this file with Dreamweaver closed. Once you delete it, the next time you restart Dreamweaver it will create a new .dat file and this will fix this bug.

Hopefully this will be my last encounter with this type of bug with Dreamweaver, but who knows what other bugs might arise – just in case I’ve bookmarked Dreameaver’s emerging issues page.