Jim Zimmerman

Ok, now some of you may already know this, so don't laugh too hard that I have been writing Ajax - style apps for almost a year and have just been using fiddler to do most of my debugging. If you have not heard of fiddler you can get that here.

Anyway, I stumbled across a very easy way to debug javascript with Visual Studio 2005. I assume this also works for older versions. All that you need to do is put debugger; on the line where you want to set a breakpoint and then open the page in IE and it will ask you if what debugger you want to use. Note: You need to make sure you are allowing javascript to be debugged in IE by checking the appropiate checkbox in intenet options > advanced.

Once the debugger is open you can step though the code like you normally would in a c# app and watch the variables. If you are making ajax calls and returning xml or javascript you can also see that data come back. If you are using JSON you can actually continue stepping through that code that was returned from you server in runtime. Pretty cool stuff! It has just made my life so much easier and I am suprised I have not heard of this before. I guess I had my head in the sand for a little bit. I hope this helps someone who has been looking for how to do this.