Chapter 10

Debugging and Error Handling

What You Will Learn in this Chapter

  • How to correct the major types of errors you may encounter
  • How to debug a program
  • How to implement error handling in a program

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Debugging is an essential part of any development project, as it helps you find errors both in your code and in your logic. Visual Studio 2012 has a sophisticated debugger built right into the development environment. This debugger is the same for all languages that Visual Studio 2012 supports. When you have mastered debugging in one language, you can debug in any language that you can write in Visual Studio 2012.

No matter how good your code is, there are always going to be some unexpected circumstances that will cause your code to fail. If you do not anticipate and handle errors, your users will see a default error message about an unhandled exception, which is provided by the common language runtime package. This is not a user-friendly message and usually does not clearly inform the user about what is going on or how to correct it.

This is where error handling comes in. Visual Studio 2012 also provides common structured error-handling functions that are used across all languages. These functions ...

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