Microsoft became a pioneer of in-browser tooling back in 2005 when they released the IE Web Developer Toolbar. Now over 10 years later, Microsoft is continuing to make investments in the developer tools in Microsoft Edge in order to make daily development and debugging tasks easier and more effective. Today, though, the company is announcing a new Edge Diagnostics Adapter, which will open up Microsoft Edge to tools outside the browser.
The new Edge Diagnostics tools will allow developers to debug sites in Edge with tools like Sublime Text or Visual Studio Code. It also simplifies workflow and does not sacrifice the power or familiarity of the tools that are already used by developers. Overall, Edge’s new Diagnostics Adapter comes to a time when the web, and web development itself have changed. The adapter makes debugging more efficient, exposes a Chrome Debugging Protocol endpoint, and can also be started right away, without a restart, or command line flag.
Additionally, Microsoft is introducing a new integrated debugging experience for Microsoft Edge in Visual Studio Code. The new integration provides the same powerful experience seen in the Chrome Debugging for VSCode release.
Microsoft has also partnered with Sublime Web Inspector to kickstart the third-party tools that work with Edge. This means that now when used with the Edge Diagnostics Adapter, the Sublime Web Inspector can be used to perform JavaScript debugging in Edge directly from Sublime.
The overall goal of the Edge team is still to make it simpler to build for the web. More improvements and a more standardized web developer interface are coming soon. For now, though, you can learn more about the Edge Diagnostics Tool, and get more information on how to deploy it, by visiting this Microsoft website.
