Conditional breakpoints are cool when you know the value of one variable that is associated with trouble: this only blows up when Xid is 1234. They can also be used to reduce the boredom of single stepping. Say you've got some loop that goes around a few hundred times building up some string or array or something. You don't want to keep going round and round and round... it would be nice to jump ahead to halfway through, for example, and see how things are looking. Now if this is a for loop with a handy named variable, say

for (int i = 0; i<1000; i++)

Then you can use a conditional breakpoint and say "stop when i is 200". Or you could be clever and stop when i % 200 is 0 -- so that's every 200 times. But what if there's no i? What if you're going through a file or a recordset/dataset/resultset and you're going until the end? You don't want to add some fake variable that gets incremented each time through the loop, just so you can set a breakpoint that breaks on certain values of that variable. Instead you want to use the hit count property of the breakpoint. Just right click the red dot and choose Hit Count. There you can set the breakpoint to break whenever it's hit, just the 10th time it's hit, every tenth time (10, 20, 30 etc) or every time after the 10th time Or, of course, whatever number you want instead of 10:

Don't debug the slow way when there are tools to make you so much faster!

Kate