Rick Spencer’s post on how developers use the debugger is very enlightening. I didn’t even realize how I use the debugger, but when he talks about things that developers typically do, all I could do was find myself agreeing with him.
I haven’t used the debugger in Visual Studio 2005 yet, but it sounds like it’s a substantial improvement over the current one. It looks like a lot of this is thanks to people like Rick performing usability studies.
He’s a great read, talking about all of the ways that the team is improving the IDE to help increase developer productivity.