Visual Basic 2012 Programmer's Reference

THE BREAKPOINTS WINDOW

A breakpoint is a line of code that you have flagged to stop execution. When the program reaches that line, execution stops and Visual Studio displays the code in a code editor window. This lets you examine or set variables, see which routine called the one containing the code, and otherwise try to figure out what the code is doing.

The Breakpoints window lists all the breakpoints you have defined for the program. This is useful for a couple of reasons. First, if you define a lot of breakpoints, it can be hard to find them all later. Although other commands let you disable, enable, or remove all of the breakpoints at once, at times you may need to find a particular breakpoint.

A common debugging strategy is to comment out broken code, add new code, and set a breakpoint near the modification so that you can see how the new code works. When you have finished testing the code, you probably want to remove either the old code or the new code, so you don’t want to blindly remove all of the program’s breakpoints.

The Breakpoints window lists all of the breakpoints and, if you double-click a breakpoint in the list, you can easily jump to the code that holds it.

Right-click a breakpoint and select Condition to display the dialog box shown in Figure 6-3. By default, a breakpoint stops execution whenever it is reached. You can use this dialog box to add an additional condition that determines whether the breakpoint activates when it is reached. In this example, the ...