A quick and dirty way to debug JavaScript web apps is to pass values to the alert() function. Not only is it short to type, but the interpreter automatically type-casts as string anything you pass as argument. In C# and VB, you can use the MessageBox.Show() method, but it is verbose, and you have to explicitly call ToString() on the argument(s) to avoid errors. This tutorial shows you how to get the same simplicity in your Visual Studio projects!- The main problem is in the method declaration: since you're going to pass any kind of data as parameter, it has to be flexible. This is where the Object data type comes in: it can reference higher-level types of variables like strings or arrays, but also value types, like numbers, Booleans, or char. Here's our basic C# alert() method - this version only accepts one argument:
public void alert( object s ) {
MessageBox.Show( s.ToString() ); // Explicit conversion here
}Note: compiled, strongly-typed language like C# and VB beat runtime speed of loosely-typed and/or interpreted languages like JavaScript. Use constructs like Object (or var) sparingly!
- Note that MessageBox.Show() accepts a variable number of arguments: this is useful if you wanted to modify your alert() method to accommodate an indeterminate number of arguments.
MessageBox.Show( string1 , string2 , myNumber.ToString() ); // Perfectly valid!But let's revise our code to accept an array instead to get more control over output formatting. 
Here's a revised method that takes an array of strings as parameter. You could cycle through array elements to show one "alert" at a time (tedious), or use the Join() method to display individual array elements in a recognizable pattern.
The pipe-character delimiters we use below come in handy if new line characters are expected, or at least possible. Without any confusion, you can tell that the last element (see screenshot) happened to contain a new line character:public void alert( params string[] args ) {
MessageBox.Show( "|" + args.Join("|\n|") + "|" );
}
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