What steps do you take with VS 2008 to reduce development time with Javascript?

Question

I am seeking your stories on how you have streamlined your client side development with Visual Studio. In particular, it seems that I need to build my site too often in order for changes to pushed down to IE effectively. What shortcuts or tools like FireBug, etc. do you use for your client side development? Do you avoid Visual Studio for debugging your client side apps all together?

Answer 1

We are developing the application which is building almost everything on javascript side, all the controls, webservice call (thru Ajax enabled javascript), grids and all kind of stuff.

We have created framework which includes ExtJs, and JQuery. It makes life easy to initialize and define all the controls in jQuery and make get data using webservice. We can use only ExtJs, however Jquery reduce the number of lines we need to define and set the controls. And of course its very light weight as javascript files are like <25-20 kb which needs to use this frameworks.

Answer 2

• I've used the steps outlined by ScottGu here to get a better JS intellisense for VS 2008. (As it is pointed out here, this patch is intended for all JavaScript files, not just jQuery.)
• I use the vsdoc files to get intellisense working for jQuery.
• lately, I had to work in a VS2005 + IE6 only environment. I've quickly got used to having Firefox for debugging with the tools I subjectively deemed essential: Firebug, PageSpeed, FireQuery.
• I tried Aptana. (As of yet however, I didn't invest much time in getting to know it - you may find it familiar if you are equipped with some Eclipse knowledge, though...)
• After all is well and done, I check pages in IE and use the built-in profiler in IE8 if there is some IE specific perf issue.
• I use the "empty vsdoc" workaround when VS intellisense gives up.
• At home, I use VS 2010 RC - and at all places I keep the API references of JS frameworks bookmarked and within reach, just in case.
• Place Javascript code in separate JS files.
• You might want to consider turning your related sets of functionality into a ScriptControl.
• When you work on some JS file and want to avoid the time of rebuilding the whole project, do not make it an embedded scriptresource from the start. Package it in the assembly when it is stable enough.
• If you are in doubt whether you get the latest version of your JS file, disable the browser cache. (It can be done from FireBug, or in the IE dev tools.)

Disclaimer: this list is really subjective and probably not complete at all.