[botman]

"If you can go without a debugger for long enough, you will eventually reach the opposite point of view where you can't imagine using a debugger frequently, except in certain types of difficult situations."

A debugger is invaluable for verifying that your code is functioning properly. When you are dealing with simple applications ("Hello, world", etc.) a debugger is hardly necessary. When you are dealing with complex data structures (think something like a BSP tree) or complex algorithms (especially things like compression, encryption, or complex pattern matching), debuggers become an invaluable tool that allows you to examine things in individual steps.

It's way to easy to create fencepost errors with loops (having one to few or one too many loops through a block of code) and it's easy to have array index out of range problems when bad pointers will overwrite the wrong stuff in memory (not always causing an access violation which are easy to catch).

A debugger is just a tool. Like a compiler, or an editor is just a tool. You can do without any of these, but it makes life a whole lot harder. If you are constantly using MSVC's Edit-and-Continue feature to fix your code, then you are probably a sloppy programmer. If you use the debugger to verify that your loops are all correct, your pointers are always valid and your code is doing exactly what you designed it to do, then you are simply using a tool to make your code more stable and correct.

botman