Debugging Strategies For .NET Developers [Paperback]

Darin Dillon (Author)

Book Description

Series: Books for Professionals by Professionals | Publication Date: April 1, 2003

"Debugging Strategies for .NET Developers" is a highly readable exploration of debugging with Microsoft .NET. While other debugging books focus on obscure techniques for advanced users, this book contains dozens of real-world examples drawn from the author's career to convey the basic thought process of debugging, as well as the specific techniques. "Debugging Strategies for .NET Developers" teaches developers how to think about debugging in Microsoft .NET rather than the specific tools. Author Darin Dillon describes debugging concepts, such as assertions and logging, and immediately follows each discussion with an example from his experiences of when that technique was used to solve a real-world bug. The book will not only show readers the techniques, but also how to recognize when to apply those techniques.

Editorial Reviews

Review

From the reviews:

"What the book is very much about is a broad, almost philosophical, approach to the activity of debugging in general. … as such it would be a tonic to any jaded programmer struggling with a project. … this was a good read and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I picked up a few hints and tips on the way, but its real value was in making me tackle the debugging task with a whole new enthusiasm." (Harry Fairhead, Visual Systems Journal, June, 2003)

About the Author

Darin Dillon has worked for a number of enterprise software companies, including Microsoft, Intel, and his current company, NetIQ. During his professional career, Darin has developed with a range of programming platforms, although he now focuses mainly on C#, VB .NET, and the .NET platform. Darin holds a master's degree in computer science from Rice University.

Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Apress; 1 edition (April 1, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1590590597
• ISBN-13: 978-1590590591
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 7.1 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,350,792 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good book, recommended, but could have been more "hard core", October 15, 2005

By 

Mark Johnson (Hartford, Connecticut) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Debugging Strategies For .NET Developers (Paperback)

This book sumarrizes the basic principles of .NET debugging quite well. The first three chapters concentrate on general debugging ideas without being very technical. The next five concentrate on very specific parts of .NET (assertions, logging, ASP .NET/SQL, remote debugging, multithreading). Chapters 9 and 10 return to a somewhat non-technical focus by talking about bug tracking and source code control.

The author talks mostly from personal experiences ("I had a coworker who did this. On further investigation, we determined that were doing [the basis of this chapter's section] wrong.") This makes the book engaging, but a few times, it leads the author into tangents on COM and interop. As someone who writes in 100% managed code, I didn't find those tangets particularly useful. I appreciated the absence of grammatical errors and poorly constructed sentences.

Chapter 9 ("Defect Tracking Programs", aka bug management), Chapter 8 ("Multithreading"), and the first 3 chapters were very well-written with a good number of "Aha!" moments. Even chapters that concentrated on technologies that I do not directly use every day (ASP .NET, logging with TraceListener, remote debugging) were comprehensible without previous domain knowledge.

Be warned that the few code snippets in this book are in C#.

I also recommend ".NET Gotchas" which goes into the idiosyncrasies of C# and VB. Who knows, armed with that knowledge, you might never have to debug! :-)

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent resource for debugging in .NET, June 13, 2005

By 

Derek B. Norton (Lehi, UT USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Debugging Strategies For .NET Developers (Paperback)

I just finished reading this book and it was so good that I figured I finally had to write a review, which I have often thought of doing for other books but never actually done. This book is full of great debugging techniques and strategies, many of which I was familiar with but just as many which I had not encountered before. The author uses an engaging style of writing making use of real-life examples from his own career that are both interesting and relevant to the technique he is describing. I found the author to be very knowledgeable and very good at communicating that knowledge.