Professional ASP.NET 2.0 Special Edition

Chapter 23. Debugging and Error Handling Techniques

Your code always runs exactly as you wrote it, and you will never get it right the first time. So, expect to spend about 30 percent of your time debugging and, to be a successful debugger, learn to use the available tools effectively. Visual Studio has upped the ante with version 2005, giving you a host of new features that greatly improve your debugging experience. So many of these new features, however, can be overwhelming at first. This chapter breaks down all the techniques available to you, one at a time, while presenting a holistic view of Visual Studio, the Common Language Runtime (CLR), and the Base Class Library (BCL).

Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?—Brian Kernighan

Additionally, because debugging is more than stepping through code, this chapter talks about efficient error and exception handling, tracing and logging, and cross-language (C#, Visual Basic, client-side JavaScript, XSLT, and SQL Stored Procedure) debugging.

Design-Time Support

Visual Studio has always had excellent support for warning you of potential errors at design time. Syntax notifications or squiggles underline code that won't compile or that might cause an error before you have compiled the project. A new error notification pops up when an exception occurs during a debugging session and recommends a course of action ...