Programming C#, Second Edition

Using the Visual Studio .NET Debugger

Arguably, the single most important tool in any development environment is the debugger. The Visual Studio debugger is very powerful, and it will be well worth whatever time you put into learning how to use it well. That said, the fundamentals of debugging are very simple. The three key skills are:

• How to set a breakpoint and how to run to that breakpoint

• How to step into and over method calls

• How to examine and modify the value of variables, member data, and so forth

This chapter does not reiterate the entire debugger documentation, but these skills are so fundamental that it does provide a crash (pardon the expression) course.

The debugger can accomplish the same thing in many ways -- typically via menu choices, buttons, and so forth. The simplest way to set a breakpoint is to click in the lefthand margin. The IDE will mark your breakpoint with a red dot, as shown in Figure 2-5.

Figure 2-5. A breakpoint

Tip

Discussing the debugger requires code examples. The code shown here is from Chapter 5, and you are not expected to understand how it works yet (though if you program in C++ or Java, you’ll probably understand the gist of it).

To run the debugger you can choose Debug->Start or just press F5. The program will compile and run to the breakpoint, at which time it will stop and a yellow arrow will indicate the next statement for execution, as in ...