How to determine which form, event, or method in WinForm app that's running to debug

Question

This scenario has come up before and I'm wondering if there is any way I can determine where the actively running form is executing within code? The problem is when I inherit a very large application which I'm not totally familiar with yet and I have it running through VS.NET 2010. I might have a particular screen up and go "geeze it would be nice if I could start debugging when I do 'x'".

If this was a simple form with some buttons I wouldn't even bother asking here; I'm not that novice. But the time consuming task is when I look at a tabbed screen in a large multi-project solution with drag and drop capabilities, right click options, etc. and have to spend 5-10 minutes tracking down where to place a breakpoint to debug.

What I'm wondering is if there is a way to have the WinForms app running via IDE and do 'something' that tells VS.NET on the next action break into the code (obviously without a breakpoint because I don't know where to place one yet). This would save me a ton of time trying to track down which event is occurring in a not so simple form or series of forms.

I hope this makes sense...

Thanks!

Answer 1

Yes, that's somewhat possible. When you use Debug + Break All then the 99.9% odds are that you don't break into code that's part of the project. A Winforms app is normally idle, pumping the message loop and waiting for Windows to tell it that something happened. You'll break at the Application.Run() statement.

The trick to then use Debug + Step Over. The program resumes running like normal. Then give a UI command (do 'x' in your question) and the debugger will break at the first statement of real code, typically at the start of the event handler for that command. It isn't exactly guaranteed that that code would be relevant, you might break at a MouseMove event handler for example. So YMMV.