Chapter 8 of Visual Basic .NET Step by Step is one that you don't want to pass over! Debugging occupies a higher percentage of a programmer's time than any other activity. It might not be a 90-10 split; most studies peg 'formal' debugging at around 50% of the total programming time. But that's still a very big number!

Then again, maybe it is 90-10! Hard numbers can be a matter of definition. Some would say (including me) that all the time after you write a line of code is until it's ready for implementation is debugging time. Even a lot of analysis and training time uses debugging tools extensively (as we did in the last lesson with the Debug.WriteLine statement).

Let's see how we can keep these bugs from biting!

"Most debugging efforts are focused on tracking down logic errors introduced by the programmer."

That's a big 10-4 there, good buddy!

This is partly true because Visual Studio .NET gives you so much help by suggesting the right code syntax, giving you automatic help, and even coding a lot of your program for you. Literally, VS.NET makes it hard to code a syntax error. For example, in the previous lesson we learned that as soon as we press enter at the end of the statement:

While i < 10

Visual Studio .NET indents everything automatically, adds a blank line for our code, and completes the code for the While loop with:

End While

How user friendly can you get?

Some of the other user friendly features of VS.NET are described in the book but frankly, the best way to get to know them is to write lots and lots of code. You will soon be totally at ease with them.