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Debugging Aids
Estimated time to complete this lesson: 1 hour
Debugging Aids
In this lesson, you will learn how to:
Use the TextWindow.WriteLine operation to debug your programs.
Debugging
Debugging is how you detect and resolve any defects in your computer program. Every programmer develops the skill to detect bugs and debug his or her program.
Even a minor bug in a program can defeat the efforts of the programmer!
While working on large programs, programmers write debugging support code that is not included in the final program. This code helps determine the point at which a program fails to run.
To debug your program, you can use the TextWindow.WriteLine operation. This operation acts as a debugging helper, and it provides information to help debug your program.
In this program, you first display an ellipse in the graphics window. If your program does not run as expected, you must debug it! You can use the TextWindow.WriteLine operation as a debugger at this point. This operation can help you trace the value of i on every iteration of the ForEndFor loop. The value of i appears in a separate text window so that you can easily detect a bug and fix it.
In this example, you use the Flickr object to download a photo from www.flickr.com and display it on the graphics window.
The image that you requested does not appear in the graphics window. Its time to debug your code!
As you can see, the text window is not displaying the path of the image, which means that you are not connected to the Internet.
You may not see the contents of the file in the text window because: The specified source or destination may be incorrect. The file may not exist at the specified source. The name of the specified file may be incorrect.
Now how do we detect the error? Its time to debug your code again
You can modify your program and use TextWindow.WriteLine to display the return value of the CopyFile operation in the text window. The return value will be either SUCCESS or FAILED. So, if your program cannot run because of the CopyFile operation error, you immediately know about it!
Lets Summarize
A program creates a slide show of images in the graphics window. All these images are stored in a local folder. With every mouse click, a different image appears in the graphics window. Use the TextWindow.WriteLine operation as a debugging helper by displaying the path of each image in the text window.