F5 considered harmful
While reading this publicized blog from Somasegar, in which he tells us that the famous "Edit & Continue" from VB 6 will work in VS 2005 with VB.NET *and also* with C#, I remembered something I read many years ago (I paraphrase because I can't remember yesterday mails, let alone an article I read in 198x):
One of the best lessons I learnt from my first boss was: "when your code doesn't behave as expected, don't use the debugger, think."
Debugging a thousand lines program going step by step is painfully counter-productive yet, for some reason, every body executes his code in Visual Studio hitting F5 and then steps through it until it blows at line 987... IMHO, it's better to hit Ctrl-F5 (which also runs faster), read the exception and the line number, look at the ceiling and ask "why?", because if you don't understand why a program does what it does, you can hardly solve the problem: F5 may help you to patch the line but it won't help you to understand the problem, F5 bloats your code with if's for what you think are "special cases". I won't lie: I use F5 almost every day: when I don't understand why, that is, when I have tried three times to solve the problem and I simply can't get it, but in truth, 80% of the time the problem surrenders to my Ctrl-F5 before I surrender to F5. As an aside, I get a better understandement of the code, and so do other people, because I've got less "special cases".