
Debug Scripting Code #39
Chapter 5, Debugging
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HACK
HACK
#39
Debug Scripting Code Hack #39
Visual Studio isn’t just a great IDE, it’s a great debugger for all sorts of
Windows programming tasks. You can even use it to debug VBScript or
JavaScript as it runs inside your web browser.
I spent a lot of time writing web applications without the benefit of Visual
Studio. Before ASP.NET, I would usually use a web tool like HomeSite to
write web applications. When ASP.NET came out and I started using Visual
Studio, I got very spoiled using the debugging capability of Visual Studio for
my ASP.NET code, but I always wished I could do the same for JavaScript
or VBScript. Thankfully, Visual Studio provides this exact functionality.
This hack details how you can set up Visual Studio to debug VBScript and
JavaScript while it runs in your browser.
The first thing you have to do to enable debug scripting is to enable script
debugging in Internet Explorer 6:
1. Open Internet Explorer.
2. Navigate to Tools
➝ Internet Options.
3. Select the Advanced tab, which is shown in Figure 5-18.
4. Uncheck the box titled “Disable script debugging (Internet Explorer)”.
After this checkbox is unchecked, script debugging will be enabled in Inter-
net Explorer.
It is important to understand that when debugging script
code, you are debugging the actual code run by the browser,
not your ASP.NET server-side code. When debugging script
code, ...