Directives

Chapter 13. Debugging

The focus of this book is to provide practical advice for standardizing your code, application behavior, and user interfaces. The underlying goal of standardizing code is to create robust, easily maintainable code with few or no errors. However, errors (bugs) are a fact of life. All coders write bugs period. Some write fewer bugs than others, and some write bugs that are less severe than others, but all developers write bugs. Microsoft Visual Basic .NET includes a plethora of tools designed to help you track down and eliminate bugs. Some of these tools are new, and some are revised versions of tools found in Visual Basic 6. It would be impossible to teach advanced debugging techniques in this chapter; doing so would require an entire book. However, I've included an overview of the various debugging tools some of which might surprise you and offered directives at the end of the chapter to help you make the most of these tools.

Note

This chapter discusses the approaches to debugging a program in the Microsoft Visual Studio IDE, not how to debug files on remote machines or components in which you don't have access to the source code. Debugging multithreaded programs is also not covered here.