What's a debugger?

100 XP
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During your journey as a developer, there's always that moment when you end up asking yourself:

Why isn't my code working?

Asking this question is a normal part of any developer's day. The trick is to get comfortable with finding and fixing your bugs with a minimum of time and frustration. When there's a bug in a program, everyone usually has their own way of dealing with this problem.

You've probably already tried one or more of these debugging approaches yourself:

  • Try running your program again because it should work.
  • Explain your issue to a rubber duck.
  • Read through your code again to find out the issue.
  • Take a walk outside.
  • Spam a few Console.WriteLine("here") messages in your code.

You might have various degrees of success with these methods. The one approach that's commonly regarded as being more often successful is using a debugger. But what's a debugger, exactly?

A debugger is a software tool you can use to observe and control the execution flow of your program with an analytical approach. Its design goal is to help find the root cause of a bug and help you resolve it. It works by either hosting your program in its own execution process or running as a separate process that's attached to your running program, like .NET.

Debuggers come in different flavors. Some work directly from the command line, while others come with a graphical user interface. In this module, we'll use Visual Studio Code's integrated graphical debugger.

Why use a debugger

If you're not running your code through a debugger, that means you're probably guessing what's happening in your program. The primary benefit of using a debugger is that you can watch your program running. You can follow your program execution one line of code at a time. In this way, you avoid the chance of guessing wrong.

Every debugger has its own set of features. The two most important ones that come with almost all of them are:

  • Controlling your program execution: You can pause your program and run it step by step, which allows you to see which code is executed and how it affects your program's state.
  • Observing your program's state: For example, you can look at the value of your variables and function parameters at any point during your code execution.

Mastering debugger usage is an important skill for a developer that's often overlooked. It makes you more efficient at hunting bugs in your code and can help you quickly understand how a program works.

Let's discover that in the next unit.

Next unit: Understand the .NET debugger in Visual Studio Code

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