The Visual Studio debugger is great, but there are some limitations. Anything very serious is going to be multithreaded, and if you block a thread poking in the

The Visual Studio debugger is great, but there are some limitations. Anything very serious is going to be multithreaded, and if you block a thread poking in the debugger, other things are going to start timing out and the real flow of the program is interrupted and impossible to reproduce. Log heavily, and log systematically - imagine you're going to need to grep through days of logfiles to find the needle in the haystack - you will eventually. Build in runtime switches to dial log verbosity up and down. Err on the side of providing more context than less. If something throws exceptions, catch them, log exactly where it was, what it was supposed to be doing, and any relevant parameters or state. If you can get them, process dump files are unreasonably effective, too.