Visual Studio offers tons of useful debugging features and allows you to step through your code line-by-line. However, there are times when you don’t want to step through your application, but want to make it output simple text strings with variable values, etc.

Enter the System.Diagnostics.Debug class and its Write* methods. By using the Debug class, you can output messages similarly to the way the Win32 API function OutputDebugString. However, the beauty of the Debug class is that when you build your application using the default Release configuration in Visual Studio, no code lines are generated for your Debug.Write* class. This means there’s no performance penalty for using the Debug class in release code.

To use the Debug class, simply add the “using System.Diagnostics;” statement to your C# code file, and call Debug.Write:

Debug.Write("Hello, Debugger!");In addition to Write, you have the possibility to call WriteIf, WriteLine and WriteLineIf. For example:

bool @this = true;
bool that = false;
Debug.WriteLineIf(@this || that, "A conditional Hello!");