DebuggerStepThroughAttribute

Here's a good one I was reminded of the other day. I was writing some code of the form we've all seen a thousand times before:

 

public Foo Bar {
  get { return _bar; }
  set { _bar = value; }
}

 

Even with automatic properties in the latest version of C#, you still wind up writing code like this a lot. Unless you're fortunate enough to be writing code in a more advanced language…like Lisp. :) (Sorry, had to.)

 

Normally this is no big deal, but there is one time where this construct can get really annoying: when you're debugging and the property is frequently accessed as the means to get somewhere else. In my code that will often look like this:

 

public SomethingProvider SomethingProvider {
  get { return _somethingProvider; }
}

 

when I have some service that I've abstracted, maybe to make testing easier. As a result, my code has lots of calls in it like this:

 

SomethingProvider.PerformOperation(arg1, arg2, …);

 

When I hit that line, I want to debug into it, but of course when I hit "step into" I wind up on the property accessor. It's even worse when there are multiple properties involved, as for example in code like this:

 

SomethingProvider.PerformOperation(OtherProvider.RetrieveValue(), YetAnotherProvider.Calculate());

 

By the time I've finished stepping in and out of that, I'm all, "Aargh! Just take me to the code!" Luckily, there's an attribute that lets you skip all these piddly statements: DebuggerStepThroughAttribute. You use it like any other attribute - apply it to a method, a whole class, or a property accessor. Note that you can't apply it to a property as a whole - it has to go on the individual getters or settors, like so:

 

public SomethingProvider SomethingProvider {
  [DebuggerStepThrough]
  get { return _somethingProvider; }
}

 

Put enough of these in and stepping in to a compound expression becomes much less tedious. Yay!

 

I don't think I'd recommend generally putting this attribute on anything but simple one-line properties of the form I've shown here, and even then you want to be careful: debugging is complicated, and I know I can screw up even simple property access - sometimes stepping into those things is actually useful, as it shows you that you cut and pasted one too many times and wound up returning the wrong value.

 

That said, you can still set breakpoints on code you've applied the attribute to, and the breakpoints will still fire.