ASP.NET in a Nutshell

Debugging

Debugging is the process of locating and eliminating errors in an application. Each error falls into one of three categories:

Syntax errors

These errors result from writing code that violates the rules of the language. A good example of a syntax error is failing to end a statement in C# with a semicolon. Syntax errors are typically caught and reported by the compiler, and thus are the easiest to debug.

Crashing semantic errors

These errors result when code that is syntactically correct results in a condition that causes the program to terminate unexpectedly or to hang (for example, looping code whose loop counter is never incremented). Depending on the condition that causes the program to terminate, you may get an error message indicating the cause and (if debugging is enabled for the page) the line number on which the error occurred.

Noncrashing semantic errors

These errors result when code that is syntactically correct and does not cause the application to crash or hang nonetheless results in variables containing data outside of the range expected by the developer, or program code executing in an unexpected order. This type of error is the most difficult to debug.

Both types of semantic errors are most typically the target of debugging efforts, since syntax errors are fairly easy to fix once they are identified by the compiler.

Two main tools are useful for debugging ASP.NET applications: the ASP.NET trace feature (discussed later in this chapter) and debuggers.

Two ...