Introduction

When developing an application, program debugging consumes a significant portion of development, and the better you understand how to use the debugging tools, the faster you can track bugs down and fix them. In this chapter, we discuss the tools available in Visual Basic .NET to assist you in debugging. You should already be familiar with some of these tools from previous versions of Visual Basic. It is important to understand the tools that are available and how to use them. Debugging will be a little different now that Visual Basic uses exceptions for runtime errors in your program.

When you release your applications, you want them to run as robustly as possible. Different aspects of program development can affect the performance of an application. Many of these concepts will be the same as in previous versions of Visual Basic, but you need to understand some new ones in order to optimize your applications. We talk about some issues in your code that can improve performance, and we also discuss some runtime performance issues and the best options to choose from when compiling your application.

Prior to releasing your applications, you should completely test them. You should not be using your customers to perform testing for you. Generally, testing is initially allocated its fair share of time. As development deadlines slip, however, the testing phase shrinks to make up for it. Most software engineers do not enjoy testing, but it is a very important part of application development. Testing...