8 Debugging and better understanding your code
This chapter covers
- Determining the source of a bug
- Fixing errors with Copilot techniques
- Debugging code with Copilot
- Using VS Code debugger to see how code is functioning
There will be a point in every programmer’s career when their code isn’t doing what they want it to do. This has likely happened to you already, and, rest assured, it is a normal part of learning to program. How do we fix the code? Sometimes, changing the prompt or better decomposing the problem like you learned in earlier chapters is sufficient to fix the problem. But what do you do when you just can’t get Copilot to give you different or better code and you can’t seem to figure out why the code you’ve been given doesn’t work properly?
This chapter serves two purposes. The primary goal is to learn how to find errors (called bugs) in the code and fix them. To find those bugs, you’ll need to fulfill the second goal, which is gaining a deeper understanding of how your code works while you are running it.
The good news is that having an error in your code is such a common occurrence for programmers that programming environments, like Visual Studio Code (VS Code), have tools to help us uncover what is going wrong. We’ll learn how to use that tool, called a debugger, in this chapter as well.