Introduction

  • 2 minutes

Visual Studio provides powerful tools to help you debug and diagnose issues in your applications. These tools are especially valuable for analyzing state and tracking down bugs while your application is running.

Screenshot of Visual Studio debugging tools.

Fix bugs before the application launches

Suppose that you work for a team that's building a new application, but you keep finding bugs in the code. The team would like to find and fix all of these issues before the app goes live. However, the issues are too subtle or complex to diagnose just by reading the code. You're looking for tools to assist you in tracking down problems while the app is running with different inputs and parameters.

What are you going to do?

This module shows you how to use the Visual Studio debugger with a .NET program. You learn how to use common features like break points and how to step through your code line by line. You also learn how to inspect the state of your program as it executes, by using tools like the Watch and Locals windows. Finally, you learn how to use diagnostic features like the Call Stack and Traces to review code execution in greater depth.

Screenshot of Visual Studio debugging in action.

What's the main goal?

By the end of this module, you understand how to use Visual Studio's debugging tools to analyze and fix issues in your application code.