Friday, March 6, 2009

Internet Explorer 8's New Developer Toolbar

If you've ever played around with Firefox's add-ons "Firebug", "Web Developer" and so on, you'd notice that there are capabilities that would take your CRM development to another level. It would be fantastic to have the ability to break down the DOM, CSS and test changes on the spot . Unfortunately Firefox is not compatible with Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

The latest release of Internet Explorer (IE8 RC1) contains the most useful tool as far as CRM development is concerned. The new Developer Toolbar holds a set of tools primarily targeted for developers in order to break down the DOM and list all elements of a web page.

Read more about the IE8 Developer Tools here.

How often have you tried to change the colour, font, visibility... of a control on the page? After a arduous task of finding the right tag, you then get to the job of making changes on your event code, save, publish, did not work right, try again...

The IE8 Developer Toolbar removes the hassle by displaying all page tags on a tree hierarchy and allowing live modifications to the page. The one shortfall that I've noted is that there is no facility to search a large page for a specific tag. Let's hope this is addressed in the next version.

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