Thanks a lot guys. I have been using breadboard thus far but my problem is with the scale of projects I am looking to do it would very quickly become a tangled mess of fury and I wouldnt be able to keep track of what went where in the event of a wire coming away. Having a development board with just a few simple ports would make things a lot easier and I can just build the unique sections on bread/proto-board. After it tests out ok then transition the sections onto proto and then develop the next bit. My first project looks to be multi-PIC (around a half dozen) due to distance constraints as well as functional division so something a little mire hardcore id definitely needed.