Beginning Microsoft® Visual Basic® 2008

Chapter 10. Debugging and Error Handling

Debugging is an essential part of any development project, as it helps you find errors in your code and in your logic. Visual Studio 2008 has a sophisticated debugger built right into the development environment. This debugger is the same for all languages that Visual Studio 2008 supports. When you have mastered debugging in one language, you can debug in any language that you can write in Visual Studio 2008.

No matter how good your code is, there are always going to be some unexpected circumstances that will cause your code to fail. If you do not anticipate and handle errors, your users will see a default error message about an unhandled exception, which is provided by the common language run-time package. This is not a user-friendly message and usually does not clearly inform the user about what is going on or how to correct it.

This is where error handling comes in. Visual Studio 2008 also provides common structured error-handling functions that are used across all languages. These functions allow you to test a block of code and catch any errors that may occur. If an error does occur, you can display your own user-friendly message that informs the user of what happened and how to correct it, or you can simply handle the error and continue processing.

This chapter looks at some of the debugging features available in Visual Studio 2008 and provides a walk-through of debugging a program. You examine how to set breakpoints in your code to stop ...