Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2010 Unleashed

Debugging in the Text Editor

The text editor—more specifically, the code editor—has several interactive features that facilitate the code debugging process. Debugging activities within the text editor primarily center on breakpoints and runtime code control. We cover general Visual Studio debugging in greater detail in Chapter 11.

A breakpoint is simply a location (for example, a line of code) that is flagged for the debugger; when the debugger encounters a breakpoint, the currently executing program is paused immediately before executing that line of code. While the program is in this paused state, you can inspect the state of variables or even affect variable state by assigning new values. You can also interactively control the code flow at ...