Developer and hobbyist need to learn how to debug code

One fundamental skill novice and hobbyist seems to leave learning or never learn is working with Visual Studio’s debugger. They hit code, which does not run as expected or throws a runtime exception and there is never a thought to debugging their code.

Over twenty years I’ve seen developers struggle with figuring out why code is throwing exceptions or code not running as expected yet these developers refuse to learn how to debug.

When appropriate when a question is asked with code not running as expected or a runtime exception is thrown, before offering suggestions ask them if they have debugged the code. If they indicate they don’t know how to debug consider sending them to the following page and how to debug for absolute beginners to learn how to help themselves.

There is really no excuse for not learning how to debug code along with when possible using Visual Studio Live Share.


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