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Testing and Debugging Applications

  • Article

Testing involves finding problems in your code; debugging consists of isolating and fixing the problems. Testing and debugging are necessary stages in the development cycle, and they are best incorporated early in the cycle. Thoroughly testing and debugging individual components makes testing and debugging integrated applications much easier.

Typically, developers look for different levels of robustness as they are testing and debugging their applications:

  1. Running without crashing or generating error messages.
  2. Appropriate action in common scenarios.
  3. Reasonable action or error messages in a range of scenarios.
  4. Graceful recovery from unexpected user interactions.

Visual FoxPro provides a rich set of tools to help you isolate and identify the problems in your code so that you can fix them effectively. However, one of the best ways to create a robust application is to look for potential problems before they occur.

In This Section

  • Creating Bookmarks and Task List Shortcuts
    Discusses the use of bookmarks and shortcuts in the Editor to easily step through your code.
  • Testing a Project
    Provides information about verifying your application before the final build.
  • Handling Run-Time Errors
    Discusses what you can do when run-time errors occur after the application starts to execute.
  • Structured Error Handling
    Discusses using the TRY...CATCH...FINALLY control structure to handle errors or exceptions that can occur in your code at run time.
  • Debugging Before Bugs Exist
    Describes how good coding practices (using white space, including comments, adhering to naming conventions, and so on) automatically tend to reduce the number of bugs in your code.
  • Isolating Problems
    Describes how to use the Visual FoxPro debugging environment to isolate those problems that are identified through testing.
  • Developing Visual FoxPro Applications
    Provides conceptual information about how to develop Visual FoxPro applications, including instructions for creating databases and the user interface, and other tasks needed to create Visual FoxPro applications.
  • Working with Projects
    Defines a project a configuration and a group of files that produce a program or final binary file or files.
  • Compiling an Application
    Discusses how to use the modular approach to make it possible to verify the functionality of each component you create. Then you can compile them into an application, which assembles the executable components of your project.
  • Distributing Applications
    Discusses how to prepare to distribute your application by including all required files and creating distribution disks, after you have completed developing and testing your application.