There are so many useful debugging features built into Visual Studio that aren’t well-known. Here are a few of my favourites, including some recent finds in VS 2013.

Clicking the left gutter to set breakpoints, you could easily believe breakpoints happen at line-level.

The Log property on a LINQ to SQL data context takes a TextWriter and streams out details of the SQL statements and parameters that are being generated and sent to the server.

Normally in examples you will see Console.Out being assigned to it which is fine for small demos and sandboxes but sooner or later you’ll want access to it in Windows or web applications. Here are some examples of how to redirect TextWriter output such as the DataContext log to other destinations.

Update: This behavior is as expected according to the .NET team but it’s probably unexpected for most users.

I encountered a strange problem this week when a conditional operator appeared to be evaluating the false expression contrary to the C# documentation. The line looked like:

I recently ran into a problem while debugging inside Visual Studio 2003.Net. Google couldn’t find me an answer, only a few other people with the same problem. Here’s my solution in the hope it might save somebody else some time.

Whenever debugging a specific VB.NET application that used a C# class library I would receive the following error certain objects in the C# class library: