Tagged with debugging

Dust-me selector tool for finding unused CSS selectors

My find for today was a Firefox extension called Dust-Me Selectors from the SitePoint guys that scans a web site looking for unused selectors in the CSS. It extracts the style references for the current page and then looks at the page to see where they are used. It can look at the current page [...]
Published in CSS, Tools on Tuesday, October 21st, 2008

IETester: test IE5.5 to IE8 on the same computer

My favourite new webdev tool of the moment is IETester. You can use it to test pages in IE5.5, IE6, IE7 and IE8 all on the same machine without messing around with your main installed version of IE. I was pretty amazed when I saw it because I’d always believed that it was a bit [...]
Published in Browsers, Tools on Thursday, August 7th, 2008

Debugging pages in Safari

I’m getting quite interested in Safari because it seems to be where a lot of the early implementations of interesting new standards is happening. It makes me happy to get a little glimpse at what the future of web development might look like. :) The problem is Firefox has really spoilt me with all it’s [...]
Published in Tools on Saturday, July 5th, 2008

Trust noone (when debugging)

One of the most important (and painful) things I learnt at uni was: trust nothing when debugging. I will never get that week of my life back!
Published in My life as a coder on Saturday, October 13th, 2007

DIY javascript stack trace

How to use arguments.callee to walk up the javascript call stack when you're doing something that a debugger can't help you with.
Published in Javascript on Saturday, May 12th, 2007

View Rendered Source in IE

I’m doing a lot of work with javascript that modifies the DOM so I really like tools like the Firefox rendered source chart plugin so I can see what’s actually going on in my page. Rendered source chart in particular is a very slick plugin. It not only takes everything in the DOM and shows [...]
Published in Tools, Web development on Tuesday, February 6th, 2007

Javascript lint – saviour of mortal developers

Something I really, really love at the moment is a little application called javascript lint. It’s a javascript syntax checker that’s built on top of the Mozilla javascript engine. You can run it over a javascript include file (I don’t know if it’ll work on inline javascript) and it’ll syntax check it for you without [...]
Published in Javascript, Tools, Web development on Monday, February 5th, 2007

New link for IE drip memory leak detector

I found a link to a new page for the really useful drip tool which looks for IE memory leaks in javascript code. There’s also been a new revision of the program by the guy who’s hosting it.
Published in Javascript, Tools, Web development on Wednesday, June 28th, 2006

Bookmark: web developer toolbars

Here’s a quick link for myself for the web developer toolbars you can install for Firefox and IE6. I love them because the web developer toolbars make doing clientside work so much easier. They give you tools to find out information about the page that you’re working on without having to do a million alert [...]
Published in Browsers, Tools, Web development on Monday, June 5th, 2006

Pausing page rendering at a certain point

I don’t know if this will be useful to anyone else but I thought this was kind of a neat trick for messing around with ASP.NET page rendering for debugging purposes. My problem was I wanted to stop the rendering of a page at a certain point so I could see how the scripts were [...]
Published in ASP.NET, Javascript, Server controls on Friday, April 7th, 2006

The resource cannot be found.

I was playing around with embedded web resources and was having a problem loading some javascript files. When I cut and paste the script link from the source of my page into the browser’s address bar I got the following error message: The resource cannot be found. Description: HTTP 404. The resource you are looking [...]
Published in ASP.NET, Server controls on Wednesday, January 11th, 2006

Refactoring tool that looks at C# and aspx files

Saw an interesting looking refactoring tool called DevAdvantage that looks like it’s a cross between FXCop and Resharper. I haven’t actually taken a look at it yet, but I really liked the fact you could set rules for things in aspx files. I think the fact that aspx files aren’t really treated like “real code” [...]
Published in ASP.NET on Saturday, October 1st, 2005

Debugging clientside scripts in VS,NET 2003

How interesting! Turns out that VS.NET 2003 actually supports debugging of clientside scripts! I’m going to miss the javascript alert function. :)
Published in ASP.NET on Thursday, February 10th, 2005

An advantage of C# properties

Just found a good reason to use properties in C# rather than public variables: they’re much easier to debug. When I was getting an unexpected value in the variable, I put a break point in the property and was able to really easily find out where it was being set.
Published in .NET on Thursday, November 4th, 2004