photo credit: Kevin Eddy

I’ve just found the cure for slow debugging in Visual Studio. By “slow” I mean waiting couple of seconds after each debugger step. The solution was suggested by Jeff Brown on one of Gallio Google Groups threads: turning off the “Enable property evaluation…” setting in Debugger options (Tools -> Options -> Debugger):

After turning this off, I don’t notice any real delay between debugging steps. The downside is that you won’t get automatic updates of values of object’s properties in Watch and other debugger windows. Instead you get a nice little Refresh button for each of the properties and you’ll need to click on it to get the current value:

I think this is a minor nuisance compared to the substantial increase of the debugging speed. Not that I’m a big fan of big debugger usage. To quote Scott Belware:

Debugging code is a slow, time consuming process.  Time spent in a debugger is sloth time.  You might be thinking that you’re perfectly effective in a debugger and that you don’t have any objections to doing code validation in a debugger rather than in a well-factored unit test.  This is merely an assumption fed by how habituated you are to using a debugger.  Without having a TDD practice, you have no basis of comparison for how ineffective debugging is compared to writing well-factored unit tests for well-factored code.

Also check out Jeremy D. Miller’s posts about TDD and debugging.