Summary

This chapter presented a broad range of tools and techniques that can be used to debug a managed application running under the CLR.

It outlined the new Trace and Debug classes and the supporting classes that can be used to determine the state of a running program. It also looked at various ways that these classes can be modified for specific applications. The chapter also looked at the Assert and Fail methods that allow a programmer to signal the occurrence of an exceptional event that requires user intervention.

The chapter looked at the process of loading an assembly. It also explored how an assembly load failure can be traced and how the cause can be determined.

The chapter also looked at the debugger that is part of Visual Studio .NET. You learned about the features that can help determine the cause of most bugs or problems.

Finally, this chapter looked at the APIs that are available to develop your own debugger, should that be necessary.