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Emanuele Bartolesi
Emanuele Bartolesi

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Open Edge Developer Tools automatically by launching debug with Visual Studio 2022

During my daily activities, I use Visual Studio constantly to work with Blazor projects.
Since Blazor is a frontend technology that exchanges data with APIs, the developer toolbar of the browser is a very important tool.
My flow to debug an application is: press F5, wait until the browser is loaded, press F12, open the dev tools (and sometimes move the developer toolbar in the right position).
It may seem like a quick activity but repeating this activity many times during the working hours, takes a lot of time and it's annoying.
I found a trick to reduce this manual activity.

From the Visual Studio toolbar on the top, click on the debug menu, on the arrow close to the name of the project.

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Click on "Browse with", in the new window, click on "Add..." and insert the following values:

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For debugging purposes, I use the Edge Developer, but this trick works with the other versions as well.
The path of my dev instance is: "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft\Edge Dev\Application\msedge.exe"
As arguments, you can set: "--auto-open-devtools-for-tabs".
The friendly name is up to you, for instance, I use the name "Edge Dev with Tools"
Click Ok and save.
I set as Default this new browser definition.

Now you can launch your debugging session as always and the developer tools will open automatically at startup.
With my screen I use the developer tools in a separate window, as you can see in the screenshot below.

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Happy debugging!

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