I Love DeBugger

I'm not sure how I ever got along without using my compiler's debugger. It's SO much nicer to see the call stack and step through my code rather just making wild guesses about what might be wrong.

I am reminded of Winston Smith's epiphany at the end of 1984 (though, I hope, without the sinister overtones). With apologies to George Orwell:

O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved DeBugger.

Stuck? Review, Debug, Rebuild.

Just finished troubleshooting a very irritating bug.

In the process, I ran up against a couple of walls and got pretty frustrated. I ended up just setting it aside for awhile, since I was out of strategies to try. I think this was the best course of action for someone with my admittedly limited experience.

I asked a senior developer about it this morning, and he encouraged me to follow this flow in the future.

I don't know if it was something funny about my IDE or just the standard n00b problem of missing some important steps, but my current build of the project was pretty screwy. This caused an error when my C++ app tried to execute a script in SQL Server. Cleaning and doing a full rebuild was just the ticket.

So, when I don't know what to do next, I'm adding "full rebuild" to the list of options.