Debugging Tips and Tricks

Visual Studio Blog

Unfortunately bugs are a part of software development, and despite our best efforts to write software correctly from the start we spend a lot of time in the debugger. While bugs are an unfortunate fact of life, finding them doesn’t have to be as painful as it often is. For you problem-solvers out there, the Visual Studio 2015 debugger contains a rich set of features that can really increase your productivity…assuming you know they exist, and how to use them! To help with you learn more about our debugging tools, I recently gave three talks on “Debugging Tips and Tricks for .NET developers”, at Microsoft’s Build Conference (60 minutes), at Microsoft’s Ignite Conference (75 minutes), and most recently on Visual Studio Toolbox (38 minutes). So check them out!

For the folks who like the printed word more than talking heads, I’ll also cover some of the highlights I hit on in the talks. These tips include both new features in Visual Studio 2015 as well as useful functionality from previous versions of Visual Studio.

Note: If you are interested in watching one of the talks, all three talks use the same demos and cover similar content, where the shorter talks are simply more selective about which features they show.

Start Debugging

While most debugging sessions begin with “Start Debugging”, there are other options as well:

  • Need to start debugging at the entry point of the application? Use “Step Over” (F10) or “Step Into” (F11) when in design mode and it will take you to the entry point of the application (assuming Just My Code is enabled) eliminating the need to find the line of code in the correct source file to place the breakpoint on.

  • No code edits to make at design time? Restart debugging allows you to quickly restart your application with debugging enabled. This eliminates the need to click “Stop Debugging”, then wait for the IDE to return to design mode, and THEN click “Start Debugging” again.

  • Need to start multiple projects in your solution? Configure your solution for multiple startup projects, to launch multiple projects with (and/or without) debugging. This is particularly useful when debugging a solution that contains applications that depend on each other at run time (e.g. a client and server).

Configure your solution for multiple startup projects

Execution Control

Need to get the debugger to the desired location in source code? Here are a few tips that can make this faster.

Data Inspection

Once you get the debugger to the desired location you’re probably going to inspect your application’s data. Here is a look at a few options:

Productivity Improvements

In the demos I also showed the improvements in Visual Studio 2015 that were some of your top requests to help improve productivity using the debugger:

Diagnostics Tool Window

Learn more

The above content was a quick sample of what was covered in the talks. If this piques your interest I would recommend watching one of the talks listed above (here are the links again for convenience–Visual Studio Toolbox, Build, Ignite—most detailed). Additionally, you can follow the diagnostics team including the debugger on our team blog.

If you have any questions or comments, please let me know through Visual Studio’s Send a Smile feature, in our MSDN forum, via Twitter, or leave a comment below.

Andrew Hall Andrew Hall, Program Manager, Visual Studio Diagnostics
@AndrewBrianHall

Andrew has been at Microsoft for 7 years, all spent working on diagnostic tools. In his time on the team he has worked on the debugger, profiler, and code analysis tools.

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