Visual Studio Hacks

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, ...