danielinsley.com

We're just coming up to finishing a two week iteration of mostly browser compatibility fixes on Viviti, mostly for Internet Explorer. I've poked around quite a bit trying to find anything that even comes close to the glory that is Firebug for Internet Explorer, but I've come up empty handed for the most part. I did find some useful software that can help your Javascript debugging crusades in Internet explorer, I'll outline the test setup and javascript debugging tools below!

Testing enviroment setup

I'm using Virtualbox for my Virtual machine, it's free, seems pretty stable, and is available on a variety of platforms. I'm using it on my Linux box at work, and my iMac at home without any problems. Next up is getting all those different versions of Internet Explorer! The following website has a handy package called Multiple IE that will install all the different versions of IE that you may, or may not want to support. Finally, I have Fiddler installed on there. I've found it particularly useful in debugging the HTTP response and request headers of AJAX requests.

Javascript debugging tools

Normally when a javascript error occurs it would be nice to know what file and line it happened on. The best thing I've found to track that down in Internet Explorer (as well as provide some handy basic debugging functionality) is Visual Web Developer Express 2008. Unfortunately this free version of the Visual Studio debugging isn't actually intended for use on projects created outside of it. Fortunately it is possible to use it on outside projects using the steps outlined on berniecode.com's How to debug javascript with Visual Web Developer Express blog post.

Lastly, there is some Firebug functionality that you can get in Internet Explorer. Firebug Lite supplies the ability to access basic console functions that are pretty handy for debugging (it beats alerting!). The only downside is that Firebug Lite is actually a javascript file that must be included while you're actually doing your debugging. Just don't forget to remove it when you're done!

Conclusion

Leave a comment if you have any other 'must have' tools for Javascript debugging in Internet Explorer, or have any questions about the above software!