Professional Visual Studio 2015

Chapter 41Debugging with Breakpoints

What's in This Chapter?

• Using breakpoints, conditional breakpoints, and tracepoints to pause code execution
• Controlling the program execution during debug by stepping through code
• Modifying your code while it runs using the Edit and Continue feature

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Long gone are the days when debugging an application involved adding superfluous output statements to track down where an application was failing. Visual Studio 2015 provides a rich, interactive debugging experience that includes breakpoints, tracepoints, and the Edit and Continue feature. This chapter covers how you can use these features to debug your application.

Breakpoints

A breakpoint is used to pause, or break, an application at a particular point of execution. An application that has been paused is in Break mode, causing a number of the Visual Studio 2015 windows to become active. For example, you can use the Watch window to view variable values. Figure 41.1 shows a breakpoint added to the constructor of the Customer class. The application breaks on this line if the Customer class constructor is called.

Figure 41.1

Setting ...