Grrr! Argh!

[chrisvenus]

I just have a need to go grra and argh a bit. Nothing serious, just a bug of doom that just won't seem to let me catch it.

I've got myself an infinite loop going on and it is due to something unexpected happening (which you probably could ahve guessed). I've spent about 3 hours trying to work out what the hell is going on so far but am facing several problems. The processing involves lots of event handlers (databinding ones) which means that running through things step by step is harder than it should be. The process involves an instance of an object being added as a child to another instance of that object which means its proving a bugger to break in the right place and keep track of what object is executing code at any given time. Visual Studio crashed and lost all the breakpoints that I spent ages working out where they wanted to go and lost all the variables I had worked out might be the cause and I was watching.

Generally I'm getting very stressed and annoyed with it. Doesn't help that I have started feeling not too good again (cough getting worse and feeling very hot though it might just be hot in here). Bleugh. Muchness of suckage. I hate bugs of doom.

Oh, if anybody has experience of debugging C# (or other) with VS.NET then feel free to pass on any pearls of wisdom in the forms of hints or tips. I can't help but feel this should be easier and that I'm missing something. :(

Comments

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

Do you have a way to add trace output of any kind ?

Debuggers are a fine thing, but over-reliance on them leads to confusion for bugs like this.

Best approach is probably to send huge amounts of detailed tracing to a file and then analyze the tracing at the point where the unwanted looping begins.

[chrisvenus]

I think I have now found the problem after a while. It seems that a variable is being set that I am not expecting to be. And indeed I can only find one place that it is set and that can't be setting it. I think I went wrong again. Unfortunately despite VS.NET giving me the option of breaking when a value changes, C# doesn't support this useful feature.

And I'm not sure if pumping out trace information would have been much more helpful really since I'd need to work out what to output. I have a feeling I just worked out what's going wrong. Its to do with the silly way this was originally programmed. If you want to embed a report inside a report do you add a report object as a child of a report? No, you go through and change loads of data in it and then just call the rendering functions a second time before then resuming where you left off. This didn't even work properly so I made it embed things but It hink that some stuff is being put in the querystring and overriding the settings for *all* of the reports and so barfing. But not all the time which is the really weird thing now I think about it...

[chrisvenus]

Ah, the debugging tool I wanted was in fact ethereal. The server was doing a redirect to a different page that I hadn't noticed partly because browsers seem to only update their url bar when the page finishes loading. Since it never did it never updated. Once I realised I was going to a different URL it became obvious what was going on (since I could separate the two page processes and it made a lot more sense. Looks like I'm reverting code to the old stuff that I dislike a lot and taking advantage of a "bodge" that I put in before.

[ao-lai.livejournal.com]

Heh, once again I've missed the entire effective posting time for something... But I too was confidently about to advocate extensive amounts of tracing. Sometimes MessageBoxes can help if you need to synchronise processes in a coordinated manner - But I should point out that I know almost nothing about C#.

Still... Tracing is good. I recommend it.