Professional Visual Studio® 2008

41.2. Breakpoint Window

When debugging a complex issue, it is possible to set numerous breakpoints to isolate the problem. Unfortunately, this has two side effects. One, the execution of the application is hampered, because you have to continually press F5 to resume execution. More significantly, the execution of the application is slowed considerably by the presence of breakpoints; the more complex the breakpoint conditions, the slower the application will run. Because these breakpoints can be scattered through multiple source files, it becomes difficult to locate and remove breakpoints that are no longer required.

The breakpoint window, accessible via Debug Windows Breakpoints, is a useful summary of all the breakpoints currently set within the application. Using this window, breakpoints can easily be navigated to, disabled, and removed.

Figure 41-2 shows two currently active breakpoints in the Customer.cs file. The first is a regular breakpoint with no conditions. The second has a condition whereby the application will break only if the mAccountBalance variable has a value less than 1000. This condition is also in bold, because the application is currently in Break mode at that breakpoint.

Figure 41.2. Figure 41-2

The Breakpoints window, like most other debugging windows, ...