Debugging Tips with Visual Studio 2010

Today’s blog post covers some useful debugging tips that you can use with Visual Studio.  My friend Scott Cate (who has blogged dozens of great VS tips and tricks here) recently highlighted these to me as good tips that most developers using Visual Studio don’t seem to know about (even though most have been in the product for awhile).  Hopefully this post will help you discover them if you aren’t already taking advantage of them.  They are all easy to learn, and can help save you a bunch of time.

Run to Cursor (Ctrl + F10)

Often I see people debugging applications by hitting a breakpoint early in their application, and then repeatedly using F10/F11 to step through their code until they reach the actual location they really want to investigate.  In some cases they are carefully observing each statement they step over along the way (in which case using F10/F11 makes sense).  Often, though, people are just trying to quickly advance to the line of code they really care about – in which case using F10/F11 isn’t the best way to do this.

Instead, you might want to take advantage of the “run to cursor” feature that the debugger supports.  Simply position your cursor on the line in your code that you want to run the application to, and then press the Ctrl + F10 keys together.  This will run the application to that line location and then break into the debugger – saving you from having to make multiple F10/F11 keystrokes to get there.  This works even if the line of code you want to run to is in a separate method or class from the one you are currently debugging.

Conditional Breakpoints

Another common thing we often see in usability studies are cases where developers set breakpoints, run the application, try out some input, hit a breakpoint, and manually check if some condition is true before deciding to investigate further.  If the scenario doesn’t match what they are after, they press F5 to continue the app, try out some other input, and repeat the process manually.

Visual Studio’s conditional breakpoint capability provides a much, much easier way to handle this. Conditional breakpoints allow you to break in the debugger only if some specific condition that you specify is met.  They help you avoid having to manually inspect/resume your application, and can make the whole debugging process a lot less manual and tedious.

Hit Count Feature
TracePoints – Custom Actions When Hitting a BreakPoint
TracePoints – Running a Custom Macro

Read more: ScottGu's Blog

Posted via email from .NET Info