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

[Nicholas Bergson-Shilcock]

Excerpts from Bill Thoen's message of Mon Mar 02 11:24:27 -0500 2009:
> 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.

This post gives instructions for using the free (as in beer) Visual Web
Developer Express to make IE debugging a little less painful. I've found it to
be quite helpful in tracking down JavaScript issues with IE7:

http://www.berniecode.com/blog/2007/03/08/how-to-debug-javascript-with-visual-web-developer-express/

Hope this helps,
  -Nick

> 
> - Bill Thoen