Microsoft visual studio debugger – an overview

History

Software application development primarily involves three functions - building, debugging and testing. Microsoft came up with an integrated version of the development environment’s debugging functions in the form of ‘Codeview’ (a debugger used along with Microsoft visual C++ 1.5 and prior versions). The need of advancement compelled Microsoft to launch a standalone; text-based debugger with more advanced features and thus came by the Microsoft visual studio debugger.

The Microsoft visual studio debugger is available free with every Visual studio package; the latest offering being the Microsoft visual studio debugger.

Features and functions

The major functions of the Visual Studio Debugger include:

* The Debugger allows the user to observe the run-time behavior of a program or an application and determines the semantic errors along with their locations.

* It has an innate understanding of the features built-in various programming languages and their libraries.

* The user can suspend the execution of the program at any instant and observe the code, assess and edit the variables in the code.

* The user can also view the registers, the memory space used by the application and the instructions created by the source code of the application.



The advanced features of the latest versions of the Microsoft Visual Studio Debugger (like the 2008 version) are:



* Remote debugging support (Even for Windows Vista OS).

* Complete symbol and source integration.

* Complete support to C++; including templates and source library.

* Availability of conditional, data, address breakpoints along with the standard breakpoints.

* Integrated debugging for codes written in both Windows native languages and ASP.NET. Multiple watch windows, stack, thread, calls and modules facilitate various ways of viewing a code.

* Debugging support for LINQ programming and local and remote SQL queries.

* Debugging .NET web services and WCF services.

* Better support for function evaluation and debugging multi-threaded applications.



Microsoft Visual Studio being one of the best platforms for software application development, many outsource software development firms are opting for it. With improvised versions being offered by Microsoft one can only expect more offshore software development companies, especially software development services in India (due to availability of technically skilled professionals in India) to opt for this software in the near future.