Joc talks about a really cool feature of Whidbey that I hadn’t discovered yet: Tracepoints.

Tracepoints are set like breakpoints – you can toggle them on and off in the IDE, and you get little red stop signs in code view. However, instead of stopping execution when they get hit, you can configure them to output a message to the debug stream.

That strikes as being really useful. Debug-by-printf can be a useful technique; the ability to add and remove trace messages without recompiling code seems like it would not only keep code clean (by removing superfluous trace statements), but be really useful for the targeted debugging of hard-to-reproduce problems.

Check out Joc's post for more information.