Learning how to debug

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There are a lot of smart programmers coming out of college. You learn a lot of great and important things about computer science and how to be a good programmer. However one thing I think more junior developers (and even us senior) ones can always learn more about is debugging.

What debugging you say? Everyone knows how to debug man, just set a break point and step through the code. Well believe it or not but a time will come when you don't have complete access or control over the code you're relying on. So debugging is a lot more then just being able stop code execution. Because of this I recommend everyone read the following blog:

Using winDBG

winDBG is a debugging tool that allows you to debug windows based applications (even .net ones). It's quite powerful and while not easy to use can allow you to track down exceptions/crashes/hangs in your code. I'm just starting with it myself and the learning curve is huge but I have already learned several new techniques for finding hard to diagnose bugs in your applications. So take some time, read the blog, and hopefully we'll all be writing better applications because of it.

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