Programming C# 3.0, 5th Edition

Using the Visual Studio 2008 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 in to learning how to use it well. With 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 doesn't 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.

For example, one wonderful debugging tool is a breakpoint: an instruction to the debugger to run your application to a particular line in the code and then stop. The simplest way to set a breakpoint is to click in the left margin. The IDE marks 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 aren't expected to understand how it works yet (though if you program in C++ or Java, you'll probably get the gist of it).

To run the debugger, you can choose Debug → Start, or just press F5. The program ...