Chapter 9. Debugging with Visual Studio 2005

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Debugging Basics

• The Visual Studio Debugger

Today's developers may spend as much time debugging their code as they do writing it. This is due in some part to the nature of today's highly dependent and distributed applications. These applications are built to leverage existing functionality, frameworks, building blocks, libraries, and so on. In addition, they often communicate with other applications, services, components, databases, and even data exchanges. In addition, developers also demand more assistance from their debugger to help increase their productivity. Visual Studio 2005 tries to address these needs by offering a number of advancements in the debugging process. Some highlights include

• Edit and Continue for both VB and C# developers

• Easier setup for secure remote debugging

• Visualizers and debugger DataTips

• Just-my-code debugging

• Better breakpoints and the addition of tracepoints

• The Exception Assistant window

• Debugging support at design time

We will cover all of these features and more in this chapter. Of course, if you are just getting started with .NET, more than just this list is new to you. The Visual Studio debugger has been evolving since the first release of .NET, which provided a unified debugger with the capability to debug across languages. In this chapter, we will start by covering the basics of debugging an application. We will then discuss the Visual Studio 2005 debugger in depth.