Saturday, July 26, 2014

JavaScript development deficiencies in Visual Studio

Many developers know that the overall JavaScript development experience has improved significantly in the last several releases of Visual Studio up to and including the release of Visual Studio 2013.

However, JavaScript editing and development still does not support #regions!!  Therefore, if you want to see this feature in a future release of Visual Studio (perhaps even an update), you should vote for this item here:
http://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-studio/suggestions/3346339-support-for-regions-in-javascript-editor-of-visual

A JavaScript navigation toolbar was supposed to be included as part of the original Visual Studio 2013 release (http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2013/07/16/javascript-editor-improvements-in-visual-studio-2013-preview.aspx), however, it seems it was removed from the final release of Visual Studio 2013.  This is a very handy feature to be able to easily navigate functions in JavaScript, so you can vote for Microsoft to bring it back here: http://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-studio/suggestions/3346341-javascript-navigation-toolbar

Of course, the biggest pain point with JavaScript debugging is debugging through the browser.  Of course, there is Integrated Debugging with Internet Explorer, but what about Integrated JavaScript debugging support for Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome.  Of course, we can launch Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome to begin our web debugging sessions with these alternative browsers in Visual Studio 2013, but what about the integrated JavaScript debugging support?  Even though we can use Firebug and the Developer Tools in Google Chrome, the debugging experience is simply not the same as debugging directly into the source code file using Internet Explorer.  If you also want this feature in a future release of Visual Studio, you should vote for this item here: http://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-studio/suggestions/6205061-provide-integrated-javascript-debugging-in-firefox

And if you are a bit skeptical about your vote counting or making any difference, just take a look at Visual Studio 2013.  It was significantly altered in look and feel from Visual Studio 2012 in response to overwhelming negative feedback about the colorless IDE!!

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