> What's the preferred programmer hardware these days then?  
Microchips pickit 2 is a good choice, good device support, not very 
expensive and works in mplab.

In general anything intelligent is much better than the dumb 
programmers. Unfortunately since most intelligent programmers contain a 
PIC there can be a bit of a chicken and egg problem with building them 
yourself.
> Looking
> through the "beginners" section on piclist.com, most of them seem to
> be "build this one yourself it's cheap and easy and will let you
> program a whole stack of different parts."  
Such programmers attract many newcomers because they are cheap and 
simple to build. Unfortunately motherboard manufacturs have started to 
cut corners on the ports or even omitted them altogether meaning such 
programmers are nowadays often very flaky.


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