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Label Your Breakpoints

With more recent versions of Visual Studio, breakpoints you set in your code are saved from one editing session to another. Because you might not always want to stop on those breakpoints, however, you will want to selectively enable and disable them. To facilitate that, from the Debug | Windows menu choice, open the Breakpoints window to view (and manage) all of your breakpoints. From this window you can, for example, double-click on any of the listed breakpoints to be taken to its position in your source code.

The only problem is that, in the Breakpoints window, all breakpoints look very much alike. Fortunately, once you're in that window, you'll also find that you can right-click on any breakpoint and assign it a label that's displayed right beside the breakpoint in the window (you can also right-click on the breakpoint in your source code and assign a label right there). If you're clever about adopting a naming convention you can then sort your breakpoints into groups that you can enable and disable with a single click just by selecting multiple breakpoints in the window. There's no reason, for example, that you can't assign one label to a set of related breakpoints.

There's more you can do in this window. You can assign a condition specifying when the breakpoint should be honored or have the breakpoint write a message to the output window instead of stopping on the breakpoint. You should start thinking of your breakpoints as a resource that lasts the life of your code.

Posted by Peter Vogel on 09/26/2016


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