Microsoft 9GD00001 manual Configuring Debug Mode

150Microsoft Visual Studio 2010: A Beginner’s Guide

If you’ve been working on your code and want to update the Call Hierarchy window, click Refresh. Every time you view Call Hierarchy, the selected item is added to the list. You can use the Remove Root button to delete an item from the list. The Toggle Details Pane button shows and hides the Details pane, which shows the code and location of the call site. In Figure 6-1, the Main method is selected, which shows the call to GetOrderDiscounts off the cust instance of Customer from Listing 6-1. The actual code line is shown also. You can double-click the statement to navigate the editor to the location of that statement. In fact, you can double-click any call site in the Call Hierarchy to navigate to the location of the call site in the editor.

The Call Hierarchy shows all of the possible paths you can take through a specific point in code. While quite useful, it’s limited to providing a static view of your code, and it does not provide the detailed insight into your running program that debugging may require. When debugging, you typically need to view the running state of an application at a specific point in time. The following sections show you various features of the debugger that help you inspect the runtime behavior of code.

Configuring Debug Mode

By default, VS creates projects with Debug mode enabled, which specifies project settings that make it possible for you to debug your application. The VS toolbar shows you the current configuration settings you’re using; clicking the drop-down list will show Debug and Release configurations. The Release configuration defines settings for your program that you want to use when you deploy it for production (actual) use. You can also create a custom configuration that allows you to set project properties how you want. For the purposes of this chapter, we will use the Debug configuration.

To understand what the Debug configuration gives you, ensure that the Debug configuration is selected in the toolbar; you’ll need to have a project open to do this. Then double-click the properties folder of your project and click the Build tab as shown in Figure 6-2.

Figure 6-2 shows that optimizations are turned off and both TRACE and DEBUG are defined. Figure 6-2 shows the properties for a C# project, but in VB, the tab is called Compile. When optimizations are turned on, the compiler will perform extra processing on the code that makes it smaller and faster, altering the structure of the code. When debugging, you don’t want optimizations because you need the code you’re stepping through to match what the compiler produces. Compiler constants (also known as compiler directives) such as TRACE and DEBUG are used by the compiler to enable or disable blocks of code. For example, the System.Diagnostics namespace has a Debug class that will only work if DEBUG is defined.