Mike’s Blog

In the last 3 weeks I’ve been developing a web services application with Windows SharePoint Services. The Services interface was called via SPAPI (SharePoint API) and the SOAP response messages parsed over JavaScript. In my previous projects so far I always tried to avoid or at least minimize JavaScript codes in my projects. I have never been a fan of client scripting and I think I will never be one (AJAX Frameworks such as GWT or JavaFX are not included here, of course). But for this case, I need a powerful JS-Debugger and I didnt know any, and I started googling it. The result was disappointing, I couldn’t find even a halfway suitable one, not even Firebug.

One of my colleagues told me about Venkman Debugger, after I tried it for a few minutes, I could tell Firebug was still far more advance than Venkman. I am not a fan of Firebug either, it has many major flaws, such as jumping to weird position of codes while debugging, not blocking all the scripts at the breakpoint and many others. Shortly, I was afraid that I had to develop a web services application without sufficient tools.But then another colleague told me about integrated debugger which came with IE8. My first thought was: What? An integrated debugger? My second thought was even worse: Integrated with INTERNET EXPLORER? And from Microsoft? But due to urgent need of JS-Debugger I have to try it as well. After testing I was, to be honest, positively surprised. Real-Time value editing, statement level debugging, easy add and remove breakpoint are only some of the nice features. Shortly, the debugger is a debugger which done what a debugger should have done. And it is from Microsoft! Unbelievable.

I still remember the days when I was learning JavaScript, and I was pretty sure that I was also looking for a decent JS-Debugger, and I didn’t found any. And that was in 1997! Until IE8 beta release date at 19.03.2009, that means that there was no decent JavaScript debugger out there for 12 years! How could that happen? Luckily, final release of IE8 is (almost) near, and the long waiting for a decent JS-Debugger has come to an end.

I never thought that I would be saying this one day, but thanks Microsoft. You finally released a product which I can say that I’m happy using it in my projects development.

Here are some screenshots of IE8 JavaScript Debugger: