With a few simple tweaks, the Visual Studio debugger can be streamlined and customized to make it work much more effectively.  Rather than showing you more than you need to know or forcing you to follow repetitive code paths, you can focus on just the parts of your application you need to see when debugging. I also highly recommend reading the resources listed at the end of this article, especially Anson Horton's PDC tips and tricks -- his PDC presentation served as the inspiration for this article. You will also want to read the related article, Visual Studio 2005 Code Snippets, so that you can encapsulate these tricks into your day-to-day activities without having to write much code.