Being a developer is not just about writing code - that code has to actually work and figuring out why it doesn't is a different mindset than writing it. Debugging is not a prescribed recipe, it is a necessary skill for any developer. While this ability is inevitably gained through experience, there are tips, tricks and techniques you can learn to level up your effectiveness as a programmer right now.

For the novice, student or new-grad, this session takes you through the most common things you don't know yet.

- how to use breakpoints effectively (there's more to it than you think)
- what the heck step-into, step-over and step-out do
- how to view and manipulate runtime state
- how to use your environment's interactive terminal to interrogate your program
- what the stack is and how it contains a wealth of information
- the importance of Known Good Values (KGVs)
- being a good investigator

This session saves you from all of those stackoverflow.com downvotes and "did you even debug this?" comments. Bring a laptop and play along! Visual Studio will be the main focus but the topics apply to any modern IDE and even the browser dev tools.

A more Visual Studio focused version of the same session I have/will present at Granite State Code Camp, Boston Code Camp and Code Mash 2019.