Trust me man, coming from someone who develops software full time for a living, if you pay a little more to get one of the newer high res netbooks you'll be just fine.
When you're at your desk you use the VGA-out to hook up a nice widescreen monitor and run it in dual monitor mode, with the bigger external monitor for your development environment and the netbook screen for testing/email/etc.
Mine has a Geforce 9400m graphics card so no problems pushing pixels on two displays at once, and when you're on the road you can still work since 1366x768 is wide enough for something like Visual Studio or Eclipse.
Earlier in the week I received my Lenovo IdeaPad S10e from NewEgg for $229. It is 10.1", and has a nice size keyboard, very close to normal size, surprisingly. The build quality is superb and I'm now a big Lenovo fan. "Only" 1GB and 160GB HD and 3 cell battery but I got exactly what I paid for. Lenovo S10e
So far Office 2007 is on it and working flawlessly. Also loaded a small photo editor that came with my Canon DSLR, and my scanner, printer, etc.
What's not to like. Next time that deal comes around, it's worth considering.
Had to turn off all the bars that Internet Explorer default settings cram onto the screen. Good grief! Won't they leave at least a couple of inches of screen for the user?
What I love most about mine is that I can get about 7 hours on an average charge in power saver mode and wifi turned on. I found a utility which shrunk my XP partition to ~40 MB and I have the rest (almost 120 GB) on a Windows 7 partition, and I also boot Puppy Linux (a light version of Linux) from a 16 GB flash drive. It's really a pretty versatile thing once you get past the small display and the fact that you can't really run video all that well on it. But for garden-variety stuff, it's more than adequate.These netbooks are really cute and a technical marvel. It's going to be fun traveling with one.
By the way, this Lenovo comes with Windows 7. Don't know yet what is really "new" and "improved" about it, other than to change the WiFi setting, I had to spend a few minutes pulling down different menus to find out where they have moved it.
That wouldn't bother me when I was younger, but don't you other geezers find out that when your remaining time on earth is getting shorter, you get more impatient when you feel your time is wasted?
But, in this case, I wouldn't feel my time was wasted because I usually like learning a new software package and often find that sort of activity to be rewarding in its own way, somehow.