November 28th, 2012
Every so often (but more seldom) I hear that IE doesn’t have a debugger.
“What?” I say. “I have been using a debugger in IE for many years.”
It is (was?) hard to find though. One way was to install Visual studio. Another to install MSOffice. The third was (is) to follow this forgotten, seldom mentioned but still working link to download. I have recently used it for debugging an unpatched IE7 on WinXP.
Today the debugger is one F12 press away.
<rant>The IE debugger has shortcuts which is a must for debugging. Mousing is doable but not for serious work. (YMMV) Chrome, Opera and Firefox have shortcuts too but they mix with the debugee – try setting the focus on the debugee form and then press a shortcut; nothing happens. By the time you, dear reader, read this the problem might have been solved but for now I am right. <mad-professor-laughter/></rant>
May 5th, 2011
This is a dispersed article about caveats I found when forced to debug javascript in IE7.
Out of date web browser. Out of date script engine. Limping solution.
To fire up the debugger, enter
debugger;
as javasctipt on a row exceuting before where you want to start debugging. One could probably divide by zero or something that makes IE throw up a dialogue asking if you want to debug or not. and then answer yes…
There doesn’t seem to be any good official debugger for IE7, unless you have Visual studio installed. Search the web and there is a NT4-compatible Microsoft Script Debugger; it is not very good. There is one or more solutions but this is the only I have tried.
If you get a dialogue/error message
Request format is invalid: application/json; charset=utf-8
when working with jquery and ajax on an iis / dotnet solution, it might be due to missing lines in web.config. The code below is for Dotnet3.5. I don’t know what it looks like in 2.0 or 4.0.
<system.web>
…
<httpHandlers>
<remove path=”*.asmx” verb=”*” />
<add path=”*.asmx” type=”System.Web.Script.Services.ScriptHandlerFactory, System.Web.Extensions, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35″ validate=”false” verb=”*” />
<add path=”*_AppService.axd” type=”System.Web.Script.Services.ScriptHandlerFactory, System.Web.Extensions, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35″ validate=”false” verb=”*” />
<add path=”ScriptResource.axd” type=”System.Web.Handlers.ScriptResourceHandler, System.Web.Extensions, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35″ validate=”false” verb=”GET,HEAD” />
</httpHandlers>
</system.web>