ASP.NET 3.5 Debugging Using Visual Web Developer Express 2008
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One of the most important features in Visual Web Developer Express 2008 in developing ASP.NET 3.5 websites is the debugging feature. Having a debugger is important in troubleshooting source code and application-related problems. It will save you a lot of time if you encounter and fix problems during the design and testing stage. This article is all about basic debugging in ASP.NET using Visual Web Developer Express; its information will provide you with an important tool for designing and creating ASP.NET websites.
Activating the Debugger
Okay, before you can start learning how to use this feature, you will need to load a project into your Visual Web Developer Express. For the purpose of this tutorial, you will be using simple ones first, like the ASP.NET web application to compute the area of the circle discussed in a previous tutorial. All you need to do is create that project in your own Visual Web Developer Express 2008 by creating and copying the source code discussed in the tutorial.
Once you have completely created the project, view it in the browser without using the debugging feature first. The form should look like the screen shot below:

Try entering any value of the radius, and then click "Compute area of the circle." You should see a result without any error. Okay, once you have done that, follow the steps below:
1. Using Visual Web Developer Express, go to Debug and click Start Debugging. Since this is the first time you'll be enabling debugging, a warning should appear like the one shown below:

Just click OK and let Visual Web Developer Express modify the web.config file. However, be warned that once the website is deployed to a hosting production environment, debugging should be disabled in the web.config. Details of this procedure will be discussed later.
After this, if you do not see any further errors, the debugger has been successfully activated. You can see the debugger window below the Design, Split and Source tab.
Also, activating it causes the project to be launched to the web browser automatically.
Next: What can be debugged, and how? >>
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