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Chapter 6: Debugging with Visual Studio 167
handling bad data and fixing null references. The program itself is not particularly
sophisticated, but it contains just enough logic to lead you down a rat hole and show you
how to work your way out. First, we’ll look at the program, and then we’ll follow up with
two bug-fixing exercises.
A Program with Bugs
The code in this section contains bugs, and it’s important that you type it in as listed or
use the downloadable code for this book from the McGraw-Hill Web site. I’ll describe
each piece of code and try not to give away all of the secrets of the bugs just yet. Later, I’ll
guide you through a process of discovery to find and fix the bugs. The program is a search
application that takes the first name of a person and searches for that person through a
list of customers. If the program finds the customer being searched for, it will print the
customer’s first and last name. Otherwise, the program will print a message stating that it
did not find the customer.
The program is divided into three major parts: a class to hold customer information,
a class that will return a list of customers, and the class containing the Main method that
runs the program. The following sections describe each of these classes.
The Customer Class
Any time you are working with data, you’ll have a class to hold that data. Since this
application works with customers, the natural approach is to have a Customer class,
as follows:
C#:
public class Customer
{
public string FirstName { get; set; }
public string LastName { get; set; }
}
VB:
Public Class Customer
Property FirstName As String
Property LastName As String
End Class
This is the minimal information required for this demo, and any class that you build
will have more properties. Notice that both properties are type string.