What's a debugger?
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.