Debugging Javascript in Visual Studio

Last week our server crashed, and had us roaming the internet with no purpose for a couple of days. Maybe one day I will write about that a separate post. The outcome of this is that all Internet Explorer definitions were reset when i connected to the new server and domain.

Since then, i was unable to debug javascript in visual studio. It took me a while to verify that I'm trying to debug the correct script and that the calling procedure is working fine.

I made sure that IIS was configured to debug asp pages, as you can see in the following pictures.

Inside the IIS console open the web site properties.


On the "Virtual directory" tab click on "Configuration".

In the configuration dialog select the Debugging tab and check the two debugging flags.

The last thing to check was Internet Explorer Options. In order to debug Javascript inside Visual Studio one must uncheck the (default) options that disable javascript debugging both on Internet Explorer and on other browsers. this is the checkbox to uncheck:

Well, Now you can just break an any Javascript line, see all values inside the Visual Studio enviroment, and generally have fun while debugging your site :)

benny is freely debugging javascript...

IFrame strikes back

Well, the IFrame bug from last post still exist, and we still don't know what to do about it.
Some good news are that this bug now appears only seldom and we are less concerned about it. We created a random query string that we attached to this frame source url, to make sure that the browser really really really not caching the page. this way the browser thinks its a new page every time. This (at least we think so) lowered to frequency of appearance of the bug to reasonable levels. Yet, the mystery continues...

IFrame object loads wrong pages !?!?!

This is truly a bug from hell.

For the last two days the upload page on our site behaves very strange. If it was not so creepy i would say the page is sick :-)
this page includes an IFrame object that shows a second page inside, we will call them Outer page and Inner page.
What happends is this: when entering the outer page we sometimes see the inner page correctly. Other times we see the inner page broken, and the source shows that not all page was loaded. Other times we see even stranger things: the inner page is partially loaded and a totally different page is appended to it's end, creating a total mess on the page.

this bug appears only on our production server (dedicated, hosted) and not on our internal network. We tried to move the javascripts on the page around with no change. We tried putting a meta tag that prevents caching of the page - again nothing changed.

We are going to try a sniffer on the response and compare it with the browser source, maybe something goes wrong while rendering this page.

I have not fount any documentation of such a bug anywhere on the net. I still didn't get any answers from any newsgroup or from Experts Exchange (a great technical solution site). I'm getting a little worried...

If anyone ever encountered such a problem or has any suggestions i will be happy to hear it.
I will keep rolling this story as it happends.

Scratching my head :-)
Benny.

Flash object fails to call Javascript function

The most popular way to show video in web pages today is to play the video files inside flash players that are embedded inside the html page. Like everyone else we did it too and it works just fine.

A new feature that we added to our site is the ability to embed our flash player into any blog or site page, and for this purpose we also added a feature that sends information from the flash player to our server each time someone plays one of our videos somewhere out there. That way we can count how many views our videos get even outside the site.

When we added this view-counter feature we could not get it to work. The flash player did not reach the server page even though we wrote the calling code properly.

After looking at some professional blogs and sites we found out the problem: we use the name "5minPlayer" as our player tag name, and the Object tag that holds the flash player should not begin with a number...

There are other limitations to this object tag, and also many things you should know if you are going to use flash on your page, especially if you are implementing extensive interaction between flash and the html page. A great page on this issue can be found here.