Debugging tips for Metro apps

Question

Hello guys.

How are you guys debugging features which depend on specific panels being shown? For instance, printing? I mean, I've managed to get what I wanted by using the console.log, but is there any other way to debug these  things? Any other tricks you're using?

thanks.

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Luis Abreu

Answer 1

Changing to discussion...

For me logging has been most effective.  As you know when a panel is up and you break into the debugger it will close it. 

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Jeff Sanders (MSFT)

Answer 2

yes, that's what I've been doing...but logging is not as good as having all the time in the world to look at everything in the debugger, right?

anyways, just thought about asking because there might be some handy trick which I don't know of...

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Luis Abreu

Answer 3

I would assume there are still conditional breakpoints you could use? Such condition I guess could contain javascript code? Never tried it though.

Answer 4

The problem with that is that the app looses focus and then the panel gets hidden...

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Luis Abreu

Answer 5

Hey Luis!

My buddy Rob Caplan just had a wonderful idea for this situation.  You could use remote debugging or even the simulator for debugging and avoid the focus change issues associated with debugging on the same machine.  I believe either of these techniques would work in this situation.

-Jeff

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Jeff Sanders (MSFT)

Answer 6

Hello again Jeff.

I'll give it a try (didn't think about it before because I'm currently using 2 monitors and that didn't help in this situation).

thanks.

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Luis Abreu

Answer 7

The emulator works great for such debugging, but is has other bugs (live tile updates not working).