I gave a talk at the New England Code Camp in Waltham this past Saturday. The topic was on how to debug JavaScript with Visual Studio. As some of my colleagues and friends know, I am a Java/JavaScript coder by day, but I do have opportunities to still code in .Net, fairly regularly, so although I am not a Visual Studio power user, I’m comfortable in it. I have been using Visual Studio to debug JavaScript for close to 3 years at my day job. I still think Firebug is the de facto, must-have debugger for JavaScripters, but since it only runs in Firefox, developers need other options. IMHO, Visual Studio is the best option for Internet Explorer JavaScript debugging.

In fact if you need to do a lot of front-end work for Internet Explorer, my suggested list of tools is:

• Visual Studio for debugging JavaScript
• Fiddler or HttpWatch for viewing the Request/Response cycle
• IE Developer Toolbar for CSS “debugging”
• DynaTrace Ajax Edition for tracking down performance issues
• Process Explorer for watching the amount of memory that IE is consuming

Attached below is the power point from my presentation. In addition to explaining how to set up and use Visual Studio to debug, and how to perform some common debugging tasks, I also talked about how/why to use Virtual Machines to debug in other versions of Internet Explorer. I’m including the reference list here:

• Visual Studio 2010 Express
• Virtual PC 2007 (for use on Windows XP)
• Windows XP Mode and Virtual PC for Windows 7
• Virtual PC Hard Disk Images for IE6, IE7, and IE8, under XP and Vista

Power Point Presentation: Debugging JavaScript With Visual Studio