Summary

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This chapter presented an overview of various features of and issues relevant to the Visual Basic debugger. If you understand the limitations of the Visual Basic debugging environment, primarily the fact that the debugger understands only interpreted p-code and runs the debuggee inside the same address space as the debugger, you can better adjust your programming to accommodate these requirements. For you to debug raised errors appropriately, you need to have the error trapping set to the specific option that will work best based on what you're debugging. The most useful parts of the debugger are the Immediate and Watch windows. If your application can be debugged cleanly with the Visual Basic debugger, you should become familiar with these windows because they can speed up your debugging considerably.

As you've seen in this chapter, the Visual Basic debugger is a study in opposites; some parts of the debugger help you tremendously, whereas others cause you some serious problems. Visual Basic has made it possible to develop Windows applications faster than ever before. Unfortunately, the weaknesses of the Visual Basic debugger have meant that when you do run into any problem the IDE isn't equipped to handle, you have to figure out a solution pretty much on your own.