Thursday, June 25, 2009

Disabling Script Debugging with VS 2010, Silverlight & IE 8

This is a quick post to cover few items related to Script Debugging and the way it is impacted by Silverlight, Internet Explorer 8 and Visual Studio 2010…

With IE 8 there is no longer option to disable script debugging… When VS 2010 will launch IE 8 then script debugging will be enabled by default… This will help people debug scripts flawlessly without having to go and change script debugging features within IE 8… While this is a good feature for most users it might at times create problem when you do not really want script debugging to be enabled for performance reasons (i.e. if you do not want to debug scripts and have lot of scripts in your pages)…

On separate note Silverlight is a special debugging option for Web Projects…  You can view that by going to Project –> Properties –> Web…  Check the screenshots below for Web Application Projects (WAP):

WAP Silverlight Debugger

for Web Sites you can view those options by going to Web Site—> Properties –> Start Options as shown in the figure below

Web Site Silverlight Debugger

Now Silverlight debugging is mutually exclusive with Script Debugging as Debugger at a time can attach to only one of the two, so when you turn on Silverlight debugging then VS has to turn Script Debugging Off…  If you have bunch of Client side scripts in your Silverlight project which needs to be debugged then in that case you will have to go to the above option and turn off Silverlight debugging to have Script Debugging enabled… 

Now a side effect of all this is that if you want to turn off Script Debugging on your regular projects then your easiest work around is to go and turn on Silverlight debugging and your script debugging will get turned off by itself…

GreggM on our Debugger team has got some further detailed work around via modifying the registry at http://blogs.msdn.com/greggm/archive/2009/04/06/disabling-script-debugging-in-vs-2008-ie8.aspx, it is a great post take a look at it…

Hope this workaround helps you!!…

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

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Steven Nagy said...

Just had a problem, and a google search turned over your article which solved my problem, thanks so much.

What I searched for: Silverlight debugger script only

Anonymous said...

Wow. This is so much better than modifying reg keys. I wish they would just add a project level option for Script Debugging.

Kees C. Bakker said...

Worked amazing. I hope they'll fix this quickly.

Lars said...

Don't you have to activate the debugger in scripts manually anyway, by writing "DEBUGGER" in your script to get it to stop at a breakpoint in any case, meaning there is no reason to turn it off using this trick ?