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

When testing and debugging applications, developers typically look for different levels of robustness:

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

Visual FoxPro provides a rich set of tools to help you isolate and identify problems in code so that you can fix them effectively.

In This Section

Debugging Before Bugs Exist: Explains good coding practices and steps you can take early in the development cycle to reduce the number of bugs in code.

How to: Test a Project: Describes how to test and verify your application project before building a distributable for your application.

How to: View and Save Build Messages: Describes how to view and save build status and error messages to an error file as they occur during the build process.

Handling Run-Time Errors: Introduces different ways to handle errors that occur at run time.

Using the Debugger: Describes how to use the Visual FoxPro debugging environment to isolate those problems identified through testing.

Related Sections

Debugging and Error Handling Language: Lists Visual FoxPro language that you can use to perform debugging and error-handling operations in Visual FoxPro programs.

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.

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.