Summary

This chapter presented the Visual Studio 2015 debugger. We covered setting breakpoints in code as well as setting conditions for when those breakpoints are hit. We discussed stepping through code after hitting that breakpoint. In addition, we presented tracepoints, which perform an action (such as printing a message to the Output window) when a line of code is hit in the debugger. The chapter also examined the many ways you can see the data presented by the debugger, including the Watch windows, visualizers, and DataTips.

The advanced debugging scenarios covered included remote processes, web services, multithreaded applications, multicore, and client-side script. In this chapter, you also learned how to use the mini dump features to take a snapshot of a running application and debug it at a later time on a different machine. Finally, we covered calling into Process Lifetime Management events for Windows store apps.

Although the debugger itself is large and, in some areas, complicated, mastering its features is a critical skill to have for all Visual Studio developers.