Professional Visual Studio 2012

Chapter 41

Debugging 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

Long gone are the days in which debugging an application involved adding superfluous output statements to track down where an application was failing. Visual Studio 2012 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 2012 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 a Breakpoint

You can set breakpoints either through the Debug menu, using the Breakpoint item from the right-click context menu, or by using the keyboard shortcut, F9. The Visual Studio 2012 code editor also provides a shortcut for setting a breakpoint using a single ...