Question

If I have a project and I do not how design corresponds to the code is there a way to make the debugger break every time I press any button so I can quickly navigate to the right place in the code or am I asking for too much here?

Answer 1

You can make a call to System.Diagnostics.Debugger.Break() to tell any attached debuggers to break at that line.

If none are attached, Windows will try to launch any registered debuggers. If not are registered, you’ll get an exception/crash of the application. So, don’t leave it in the code in production 🙂

e.g. (as per icemanind’s comment)

#if DEBUG
    Debugger.Break();
#endif 

If you want to break on a click of any button, it gets a bit tricky. The easiest thing is to write a Button wrapper class and override OnClick and put your Break call in there. For example:

public class ButtonWedge : Button
{
    protected override void OnClick(System.EventArgs e)
    {
        Debugger.Break();
        base.OnClick(e);
    }
}

Once you add that class you can drag and drop it on the design surface. But, if you’ve already got code, you can edit the designer.cs file and replace System.Windows.Forms.Button with ButtonWedge.

Once in OnClick, you can see where the Click event will go by looking at the base classes Events array with the Control.EventClick key. That will contain a multicast delegate that you can look at the Method and Target properties to find out what has subscribed to this Click event. In other words, the name of the click handler at runtime will be:

string handlerName = base.Events[Control.EventClick].Target.GetType().FullName + '.'
   + base.Events[Control.EventClick].Method.Name;

It doesn’t really put a break point in a particular Click event but lets you know what’s going on and where…