Debugging and the Development Cycle

The PowerBuilder debugger lets you detect and diagnose problems while you run your application

After you build all or part of an application, you can run it directly in the PowerBuilder development environment. To simulate how your users will see and run the completed application, you can run it in regular mode.

However, an application often does not behave as you expect. Perhaps a variable is not being assigned the value you expect, or a script does not perform as desired. To detect problems as they occur during execution and to diagnose their causes, you can run your application in debug mode.

The PowerBuilder debugger lets you stop execution at places or times that you determine, such as a particular line of code or a function. The debugger also provides special tools for examining the application's state at each of those points.

Note: The PowerBuilder .NET debugger is based on the Visual Studio shell, so it is different from the PowerBuilder Classic debugger in important ways. See PowerBuilder .NET Debugger Changes for a summary of these differences.