Getting Started - Metro Revealed: Building Windows 8 Apps with HTML5 and JavaScript - page 16

You can use the debugger keyword only for code you can modify, however, which means
that I have to take a different approach when I want to break the debugger on a statement in one
of the Microsoft base.js and ui.js JavaScript files. To do this, I have to select the statement I
am interested in, right-click, and select Breakpoint ➤ Insert Breakpoint from the pop-up menu.
The effect is the same, but no modifications are made to the file.
I recommend exploring the Visual Studio debugger; it is more sophisticated than the
developer tools available in browsers, and it is well worth a couple of hours to get to grips with
how it works.
Summary
In this chapter, I introduced the structure of the topic and provided a brief preview of what you
will find in the chapters that follow. I also showed you the anatomy of a basic Metro project
and created the example project that I will build on for the rest of the topic. Finally, I showed
you how to use the simulator to run a Metro application and briefly touched on the two ways
to cause the Visual Studio debugger to break when running your code. In the next chapter, I'll
start to add some functionality to the example and begin using some of the features of the WinJS
API. I start by defining a view model and demonstrating how to bind the data it contains to the
Metro app layout; this is an essential technique for building robust apps that are easily to build,
scale, and maintain.