In this article I will demonstrate the ability to activate and use the Internet Explorer developer console from within an Office Add-In.

Introduction

As I have discussed before, without using the debugging tools available within Visual Studio it is hard to debug Office Add-In development. In the past I have used firebug lite to assist in this but it is far from ideal. Within Windows 10 there is a new capability to open a developer console which help alleviate this issue to an extent.

F12

On a Windows 10 operating system you will find F12 in the %system32% directory. Normally this would be c:\windows\system32\F12\F12chooser.exe

 

Open up you favorite Office Add-In and or one you are working on and then open F12Chooser

 

Selecting TaskPane.html in this case will open the Internet Explorer developer tools for that web page. In Windows the Office Add-In is surfaced through an embedded IE windows within the office client.

Using the developer console you can execute commands as normal

You can also use the selector tool to look at styles

 

Thanks to Michael Zlatkovsky (Microsoft Office Add-In dev – this guy) for showing me this 🙂

Conclusion

This is a major improvement for me over having to use firebuglite – interestingly though Michael was very intrigued that I had got that to work as well 🙂