Debugging ASP.NET

Tier Sandboxes

The first question that must be answered to fix a bug is,“Where is it?” Most ASP.NET web applications have three (or more) tiers to them, so finding a bug (particularly a subtle one) in such a large system can at first appear to be a daunting task. The first thing that you can do to get a better handle on the situation is break the system into parts. Because web applications are typically broken into logical tiers already, it only makes sense to use this as the first level of debugging segmentation. For the purposes of this book, we assume a system containing three tiers: a data tier, a business object tier, and a user interface (for example, web page) tier.You can then test each tier and eliminate the ones that are not contributing ...