{"id":602,"date":"2006-05-26T16:22:12","date_gmt":"2006-05-26T21:22:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ashleyit.com\/blogs\/brentashley\/?p=602"},"modified":"2006-05-26T16:34:03","modified_gmt":"2006-05-26T21:34:03","slug":"free-tools-for-debugging-javascript-and-ajax-apps-with-internet-explorer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ashleyit.com\/blogs\/brentashley\/2006\/05\/26\/free-tools-for-debugging-javascript-and-ajax-apps-with-internet-explorer\/","title":{"rendered":"Free Tools for Debugging Javascript (and Ajax apps) with Internet Explorer"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I have seen a lot of griping over the years about an imagined scarcity of debugging tools for IE.  I find it remarkable that people in the business don&#8217;t know what&#8217;s available.<\/p>\n<p>Microsoft has had great debugging tools for IE since Visual Interdev as far back as 1998 or so and continuing through to <a href=\"http:\/\/msdn.microsoft.com\/vstudio\/\">Visual Studio<\/a>.  The visual studio debugger has breakpoints, watch variables, call stack, step in\/out\/over, object browsing, immediate window, debug output window, and more.<\/p>\n<p>If you didn&#8217;t want or need an entire IDE, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/downloads\/details.aspx?FamilyID=2f465be0-94fd-4569-b3c4-dffdf19ccd99&#038;displaylang=en\">Microsoft Script Debugger<\/a> became available as a download for NT4 and Win98\/ME, later becoming a component delivered with Windows operating systems as of Windows 2000 that simply required enabling.  The Script Debugger is a lot lighter than the VS debugger, but still has  breakpoints, watch variables, call stack, step in\/out\/over,  immediate window, and debug output window.<\/p>\n<p>Now Microsoft has released their <a href=\"http:\/\/msdn.microsoft.com\/vstudio\/express\/vwd\/\">Visual Web Developer Express<\/a> IDE for free.  Install it, then in your browser&#8217;s advanced options, uncheck the two boxes that disable debugging, and you have a debugger that is every bit as powerful as Mozilla&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mozilla.org\/projects\/venkman\/\">Venkman<\/a> ever was.<\/p>\n<p>Here is a screenshot of a simple single-page debug session (click to open full size):<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.ashleyit.com\/blogs\/brentashley\/debug.JPG\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.ashleyit.com\/blogs\/brentashley\/debug.JPG\" alt=\"Visual Web Developer Debug Session\" width=\"450px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>No wonder it took so long for Javascript to get any respect if people didn&#8217;t know that there were decent tools for it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I have seen a lot of griping over the years about an imagined scarcity of debugging tools for IE. I find it remarkable that people in the business don&#8217;t know what&#8217;s available. Microsoft has had great debugging tools for IE since Visual Interdev as far back as 1998 or so and continuing through to Visual [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"activitypub_content_warning":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2,1,12,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-602","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ajax","category-blather","category-development","category-javascript"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ashleyit.com\/blogs\/brentashley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/602","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ashleyit.com\/blogs\/brentashley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ashleyit.com\/blogs\/brentashley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ashleyit.com\/blogs\/brentashley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ashleyit.com\/blogs\/brentashley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=602"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ashleyit.com\/blogs\/brentashley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/602\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ashleyit.com\/blogs\/brentashley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=602"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ashleyit.com\/blogs\/brentashley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=602"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ashleyit.com\/blogs\/brentashley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=602"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}