Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 6 is almost universally hated by web developers. It’s hard to work with and support, but with a few solid techniques, you can make the process less painful. What “just works” in the majority of browsers will almost always require hours of tweaks and workarounds to get it working in IE6. With more and more users switching over to newer alternatives such as IE8, Safari and Firefox hopefully support for IE6 can be dropped sooner rather than later. In the mean time though many of us have to make sure our sites work in this awful browser. This presentation shows you how!

2. Getting started
- Open Tools > Internet Options > Advanced
- Enable the “script debugging” option
- Restart IE
Now when IE6 runs into a javascript problem
it will prompt you to debug the issue with
Visual Studio. You can also use the free
Express Edition

4. Debugging
Just seeing the cause of the problem
highlighted is sometimes enough for us to
work out what has gone wrong.
In more complex cases we can use Visual
Studio's debugging windows to help us get
more information and diagnose the problem.
The windows can be accessed via the
Debug > Windows menu.

5. Locals Window
Shows us all the local variables, their type,
and their value.
Keyboard shortcut: Ctrl+D, L

6. Call Stack Window
Shows the current call stack, and allows us
to step back through the stack.
Keyboard shortcut: Ctrl+D, C

7. Immediate Window
By far the most powerful debugging tool that
Visual Studio has to offer, allowing us to
evaluate javascript expressions on the fly.
We can inspect global variables, assign
values to any variable within the current
scope, and evaluate any expression we
want!
Keyboard shortcut: Ctrl+D, I

8. Immediate Window Trick
The immediate window displays object
values but doesn't display anything for
functions.
Trick: “alert(function_variable)” will display
the function's code in an alert message!
Use “alert(argument.callee)” to display the
code of the calling function.

9. More Information
These slides are based on a blog post
available at Six Revisions, which includes
far more detail and lots of examples.
Also take a look at www.coderholic.com.
Feedback or questions:
ben@coderholic.com