“Hidden Secrets” of the Visual Studio .NET debugger? [closed]

Answer 1

This is kind of an old one. If you add a watch expression err,hr, then this will hold the result of GetLastError(), formatted as an HRESULT (VC++ debugger only).

Answer 2

For .net applications System.Diagnostics has lots of useful debugging things. The Debugger class for example:

Debugger.Break(); // Programmatically set a break point
Debugger.Launch(); // Launch the debugger if not already attached
Debugger.IsAttached // Check if the debugger is attached

System.Diagnostics also has lots of good attributes. The two I've used are the debugger display attribute for changing the details put into the locals window and the step through attribute for skipping code you don't care about debugging:

// Displays the value of Property1 for any "MyClass" instance in the debugger
[DebuggerDisplay("{Property1}")]
public class MyClass {
    public string Property1 { get; set; }

    [DebuggerStepThrough]
    public void DontStepInto() {
       // An action we don't want to debug
    }
}

Answer 3

• The threads window, from Debug -> Windows -> Threads. You can Freeze and Thaw threads, and switch the active thread. This is awesome when debugging or replicating an issue with a multithreading application.
• You can drag & drop the yellow "Next Statement" arrow to another place. When the program resumes, it will resume execution at that statement. You can add it to the toolbar, a blue arrow called Set Next Statement, but it's not there by default.
• You can "undo" the navigation you did, like scrolling, going to another file, or jumping to a reference. The shortcut is ctrl-- (control minus.) That way you can jump into a function, examine the code there, and go back to where you were without looking.

Answer 4

Conditional breakpoints.

Answer 5

You can drag current line cursor (yellow arrow) up and down your code when execution is paused.

Additionally, in order to enable this during pause on exception you have to click "enable editing" on exception details first.

You can also make VS break on handled exceptions by checking one's of interest under: Debug->Exceptions : Thrown column

Answer 6

As posted in another post Sara Ford is doing a current series on the VS debugger.

Her blog is the best source of VS tips: http://blogs.msdn.com/saraford/archive/tags/Visual+Studio+2008+Tip+of+the+Day/default.aspx