Microsoft 9GD00001 manual Stepping Through Code, Managing Breakpoints

158Microsoft Visual Studio 2010: A Beginner’s Guide

Figure 6-7 The Breakpoints window

Managing Breakpoints

Over time, breakpoints can be set across many locations in your project. You can manage all of these breakpoints in a central location by selecting Debug Windows Breakpoints, which will show the window in Figure 6-7.

Much of the functionality of the Breakpoints window has been explained already, except that the toolbar options apply to all of the breakpoints that are currently checked. Clicking a column sorts the contents. The Search box helps you filter breakpoints, and the In Columns box helps focus on what the search applies to. There are export and import buttons on the toolbar that allow you to respectively save and retrieve breakpoints to and from an XML file. Double-clicking any breakpoint takes you to the location in the editor where the breakpoint is set. Right-clicking a breakpoint shows a context menu with options that have already been discussed in this section.

Once you set a breakpoint, you can step through code to see what the execution flow of the program is, as is discussed in the next section.

Stepping Through Code

Stepping through code is the process of executing one or more lines of code in a controlled manner. At the most granular level, you can step through code line-by-line. While moving line-by-line is often necessary, it could also be cumbersome, so there are ways to step over multiple lines of code, allowing them to silently and quickly execute.

To step through code, open a project, set a breakpoint, and run with debugging until the program hits the breakpoint. At that point in time, you can perform various operations such as step, step over, and step out. Table 6-2 explains the stepping operations that are available. The explanations in the table assume that a breakpoint has been hit with your executing program now paused before performing the step operation.