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by de90 4964 days ago
No GP but, personally I don't feel it's as good as the VS debugger. Unless I am missing something you still have to type into the console to get the value of things you want instead of just hovering over things, or bringing up quick watch in visual studio.

Also I'd imagine (haven't used it yet!) if you change the source in visual studio while debugging it would save to a file, while I cannot do that in chrome. I think I've heard it's possible in chrome, but never really seen how.
3 comments
dmethvin 4964 days ago
Chrome's debugger is darned near a full dev environment at this point, it's just not documented all that well and a lot of the best stuff has only been added recently. You can even edit the files, run the edited code, and save the changes locally.

You know what's really good about the Chrome debugger? It's free and it's on every computer that runs Chrome. Visual Studio is neither of those. I really wish they built VS functionality into the IE debugger.

As far as showing variables, one trick I use a lot is to set a conditional breakpoint where the code to execute is `console.log(stuff), false` so that it just logs stuff but doesn't ever stop. That's also handy for "fixing" variable values without stopping.

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simplyinfinity 4964 days ago
VS is free , well , at least the express version , which is more than enough for web development. personally , I prefer to debug JS in VS than than in Chrome. The chrome debugger never really worked well for me or did stuff as I would expect them.
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ryanmolden 4964 days ago
Does it have conditional breakpoints and tracing breakpoints? I find the latter mostly entirely eliminate the need to sprinkle printf-equivalents to follow complex flows. For full disclosure I work on VS, but not the debugger or in Javascript, and I really don't know about Chrome's dev tools, but having seen some people's approaches to debugging JS, it feels like it is in a relatively primitive state from what I am used to in other languages.
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dmethvin 4964 days ago
Yes and yes.
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ryanmolden 4964 days ago
I see conditional breakpoints, where are the tracing variety?

EDIT: Oh, I see, from your comment you are just leveraging the conditional breakpoint to ad-hoc them. That works but is a bit uglier than truly supported tracing breakpoints, and wouldn't appear to offer things like dumping the callstack to the output window or only triggering the print out only when specific conditions are met (i.e. a conditional tracing breakpoint). I suppose you could ad-hoc that as well by surrounding the print code with an if(<condition>) { print stuff }, <condition>. Works, hacky, but works I suppose.

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mattmanser 4964 days ago
VS is free.
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quarterto 4964 days ago
You can hover in the Chrome Debugger (https://www.dropbox.com/s/fsr2cnf22exakts/hover.png). And it looks like saving to files is possible too (https://github.com/NV/chrome-devtools-autosave).
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robertpateii 4964 days ago
You can hover over variables to get their value. There is a quick watch area in which you can add variables.

You can't change the source directly, but you can change the properties of an object and change global variables with the console.

https://developers.google.com/chrome-developer-tools/docs/sc...

http://stackoverflow.com/a/4949829/352087

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