Visual Studio.NET Quirks

One of the things you learn, as a developer learning a new development environment, is the set of quirks that the development environment has.  Once you know the quirks, then you can recognize them and deal with them.  But until you know them, life can be difficult.

Well, today I learned one of the quirks of Microsoft Visual Studio.NET.  If you examine variables while stopped at a breakpoint in the debugger, magical things can happen.  I don't know how that happens, but it probably has to do with a class's properties.  I my case, some instance variables are set as properties that depend on other instance variables.  These instance variables somehow get set magically when you examine their values in the debugger.  I verified that if I don't examine the instance variables, they have the values I expect (empty string, verified by printing them).  If I do examine them, then they get correct values in some magical way, presumably by calling the code that "gets" the property (but without stopping at a breakpoint in that code).

Now that I have found that quirk, life with Visual Studio.NET can go on.

2:38:31 PM