Visual Studio debugger tips & tricks for .NET

Answer 1

I found the Modules window useful a lot of times. It tells whether the debugger has loaded a required dll and which version of the dll is loaded. It also lets you manually load or unload a dll.

Answer 2

How about setting the IDE to break into exceptions when they occur, even when we don't have any debug point set.

Debug--> Exceptions-->Commmon Language Runtime Exceptions-->Thrown

This makes finding hidden exception handling problems a breeze. Actually this is kind of a setting every developer should have set through out the development, to avoid any unhanded or even handled exceptions that are going underneath.

Answer 3

Two from me: one that I hope everyone uses all over the place:

Debug.Assert(<condition>, <message>)

the second DebuggerHidden:

<DebuggerHidden()> _
Public Sub ReadDocumentProperty(ByVal propertyName As String, ByRef PropVal As Integer, ByVal DefaultVal As Integer)
    Try
        Dim prop As Office.DocumentProperty
        prop = CustomProps.Item(propertyName)
        PropVal = CType(prop.Value, Integer)
    Catch
        PropVal = DefaultVal
    End Try
End Sub

Even if you have Debug, Exceptions, Break on thrown exceptions set, exceptions in here will not be caught.

Answer 4

A few from me

• Uncheck the "Enable Just My Code" option in Tools->Options->Debugging.
• Conditional breakpoints - they save my life almost every day
• Use the .NET framework source if things get ugly

Answer 5

try {
    // do something big
}
catch {
    // breakpoint set here:
    throw CantHappenException("something horrible happened that should never happen.");
}

How do you see the exception that was originally thrown? In a watch window, enter $exception

Answer 6

In unmanaged code you can set "data breakpoints". They user the debug registers of the CPU to issue an INT3 and the debugger stops on that instruction with no overhead during run time (in older version the debugger stepped through the program checking the memory..... slow!)

This is useful if you have some corruption at a knwon address (stack / heap vaiable getting clobbered).

Also AutoExp.dat in ide\packages\debugger can be customized to show your data structures.

pointer, mb shows a hex dump in the watch window http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dd252945.aspx

Yum!