Next up Fritz Onion with a presentation on the different tooling we can use for debugging AJAX apps while we wait for the Orcas release of Visual Studio. What the session amounted to was an overview of the different extensions for IE and Firefox available in this space. What was great about the session is the fact that he gave a very good presentation. He speaks in an engaging manner and gets the points across easily. Not much to write home about contentwise we're were basically given a demo of the stuff I list further down. It did give a great starting point as to which tools to try out thus getting me started relatively easily with creating our AJAX apps. Also a good thing to have a couple of more tools on your radar should you end up in a situation where you'll need it.

The tools available today include:

Visual Studio Javascript Debugger

Microsoft Script Debugging

Firefox Javascript Debugging

Firefox DOM Inspector

Firebug

• You will need this one

JavaScript Shell

• A shell for exploring Javascript code as well as executing little snippets

Fiddler

• HTTP proxy which intercepts the traffic on port 80 and displays it. You can even modify the request to do some testing or hack proofing if you so fancy.

ASP.NET Development Helper

• Main function is to decode ViewState and show its contents. You also have a DOM explorer in there.

TcpTrace

• Does the same thing as Fiddler but it doesn't install itself as a HTTP proxy which is both a good thing and a bad thing. A good thing if you don't want some debugging tool to take over your system, a bad thing because you will have to do a couple more steps to get it working. I'd probably stick with Fiddler.

IE Developer Toolbar

• Probably doesn't need further introduction

Web Developer Toolbar

• Same for this guy. Though one thing to note is the fact that it has so much stuff that it gets hard to find what you're looking for in the menus.

Tamper Data

• Surprisingly enough it allows you to tamper with the request, like Fiddler and TcpTrace does.