[OpenLayers-Users] Advice for Debugging IE7 in an OpenLayers Project

[Bill Thoen]

I'm relatively new to JavaScript and OpenLayers so it may be just my 
ignorance but it seems that IE is pretty unreasonable when it comes to 
debugging JavaScript. If Microsoft didn't have such a large piece of the 
browser market, I would gladly ignore supporting it, l but you can't 
ignore 800-lb gorillas--even if they act like a monkey half the time.

So I've got an OpenLayers project that works perfectly under Firefox, 
but it can't get through the first pass of IE7's compiler . Worse, it 
complains about errors on lines that don't exist so it's damn near 
impossible to find the code that's bothering it. I cut out sections of 
code with comments trying to isolate the bug and still it's just as 
likely to report the error has not changed lines as it is to report it 
inside a block of commented-out code!

I can't believe that IE is really this crappy, so I assume I'm not doing 
something right regarding some settings or something like that. But how 
do people working with IE debug errors like  "OpenLayers is not defined" 
(when it obviously is defined because the same code works with FF)? Or 
do you plod through the whole code alternately commenting out chunks 
until you find the one with the bug in it (which is never where IE says 
it is!) Is there a tool like Firebug for IE? Any suggestions or tips on 
how to deal with this cranky software would be welcome.

- Bill Thoen