DebuggerHidden Attribute and Other Cool Debugging

Debugging a page that uses many methods from other classes can become a right pain in the neck. I find myself accidentally stepping into a method that I don’t need to debug or wanting to output specific values from my methods straight away. Being the cowboy (correction, agile) developer that I am, one of my code boffins at work showed me a two cool ways to meet my debugging needs:

1) DubuggerHidden Attribute

Using the DubuggerHidden attribute tells the Visual Studio debugger that the method is hidden from the debugging process. The simple example below, shows the DebuggerHidden attribute in use:

protected void btnDoSomething_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{    
    //Output random number to Textbox
    txtOutput.Text = GetNumber(1, 10).ToString();
} 
 
[DebuggerHidden]
int GetNumber(int min, int max)
{    
    System.Random random = new Random();
    return random.Next(min, max);
}

2) DebuggerDisplay Attrubute

The DebuggerDisplay attribute allows us to output variable values from a class or method to be displayed in our Visual Studio debugger. The attribute includes a single argument that is supplied as a string. The string can contain references to fields, properties and methods in the class so that the actual values from an object may be included in its description.

[DebuggerDisplay("a={a}, b={b}, ValueTotal={CalculateValues()}")]
public class AddValues
{    
    public int a { get; set; }
    public int b { get; set; }
    
    public int CalculateValues()
    {
        return a + b;
    }
}

You also have the ability to include simple expressions, like so:

[DebuggerDisplay("a={a}, b={b}, ValueTotal={CalculateValues() * 2}")]

In addition to the “DebuggerHidden” and DebuggerDisplay attributes, .NET contains some very useful attributes that modify the behaviour of a debugger. For me, they weren’t as interesting as the two debugger attributes I listed above. :-)