5 Debugging Tricks Every Visual Studio Developer Should Master

Rendering a zero-error application can only be achieved with sound debugging, that forms an inevitable part of the software development life-cycle. Debugging is a time-taking and challenging task for the developers most of the times. The process of detecting errors in a program code and fixing them is called debugging.

Microsoft Visual Studio is a powerful and interactive IDE (Integrated Development Environment) extensively used by developers to create feature-rich computer applications, web, and mobile apps. With outstanding debugging capabilities, Microsoft Visual Studio allows developers to perform effortless debugging by adding breakpoints, error listing, visualizing the program flow, controlling the program execution, viewing and editing the variables and other code elements.

Below mentioned tricks can contribute the smooth progress at debugging stage of the development in Visual Studio:

1. Evaluate Expressions with Mouse Hover: Stepping into the program code and spotting the errors in the written functions can be cumbersome and time-consuming. Without adding watch expressions, you can simply move the mouse pointer at the variable, expand the classes and structures in the code and identify the code requiring rectifications.

2. Change Values: The Visual Studio debugger can be activated with F5 to check the program behavior and compare it to the expected outcomes. If required, any time any value in the code can be altered by double-clicking at the value and re-entering the new one.

3. Set Next Statement: While debugging, if any encounter to the function call returns an error or fails, you need not repeat the debugging process. Instead, on identifying the failed function call, you can simply set the next statement manually by dragging and moving the yellow arrow marker onto the statement to be executed next.

4. Edit and Continue: During the program debugging process, you can continue without stopping with Visual Studio’s in-place editing capabilities. This helps you save time in stopping, rectifying and restarting with every bug. Visual Studio continues debugging further from the modified point in the program.

5. A Watch Window: A watch window in Visual Studio allows you to add and remove variables, track opened handles by the application, view error code of functions, and know the registers holding returning value by the functions. This eases the entire debugging and error tracing process.

6. Set Breakpoints: Microsoft Visual Studio allows you to set breakpoints inside the program, directing debugger to stop at those points. These breakpoints can be defined inside the functions, call stacks and disassembly window. You can define the conditional settings if you want the debugger to skip universally defined breakpoints for a specific statement.

Conclusion

The robust features such as massive library extensions, debugging and automation tools, split screen support, customized dashboards, continuous delivery tools, emulator, script editor etc. make Visual Studio quite popular amongst software developers and programmers.

Microsoft Visual Studio supports DHTML, JavaScript, ASP.NET, Visual Basic, C#, C++, Visual F#, XAML and more programming languages, that contribute to in its wide adoption worldwide.

You can embrace your software development, programming and debugging skills with Microsoft .NET Framework/ Visual Studio training and certification courses offered by the authorized gold training partner of Microsoft. The Microsoft Visual Studio training courses available for the beginners and professional developers can be taken through blended learning modes and custom schedules based on your convenience.