hi all,
am beginner for c++ environment.
i need to debug de c++ code stuffs .
so need some help and tips for effective debugging for fixing bugs
am supposed to use Microsoft Visual Studio

I believe MSVS has built-in debugging tools. Any reason you cant use them?

okey thanks .
is there any other alternative for debugging

Well placed cout/cerr/ofstream object calls. Can be pretty handy as sometimes Visual Studio's debugger limits the scope of variables you need to know the value of, but a real pain to insert and remove.

If you are going to use tracer bullets (output statements for debugging) you may as well design them so they can be turned off at compilation (or by internal flag)

Internal flag example
I used C examples above as it makes the example easier, but you can derive equivalent methods in C++ that accomplish the same.

Actually, the debugger integrated into Visual Studio's IDE is one of the best debuggers around. With not a lot of poking about the menus or reading the help, it is fairly simple to display watch windows displaying the running values of selected variables, a stack trace, & memory contents of specified regions of memory. Yes, this can be done in other debuggers as well (as it should...), but this is easily done in Visual Studio's debugger.

As for generalized debugging techniques, yes, the brute force method many will advocate is by integrating printf() statements in one form or another, however this can adversely affect performance if the purpose of the code is time-critical.

Fundamentally, nothing replaces knowledge of the problem space. If you have prior experience debugging code & debugging code related to the problem at hand, you will be able to more effectively & efficiently track down errors. Yet in the absense of domain-specific knowledge:

• focus on whatever variables appear to be most important to the application & watch their values as execute proceeds through the logic.
• watch dynamic memory allocations & pointer usage. Ensure that all addresses being manipulated are initialized & that any memory copies done to allocated memory.
• If arrays are involved, make sure that reading & writing past the end of arrays is not done.
• watch scoping. Make sure that whatever variables are being used are still in scope.

As can be seen in this list, in the absence of specific knowledge about the domain space, one has to fall back on ensuring that language features are not being unduly abused.

Lastly, experience helps. The more you debug, the better you will become at the skill. Learning to debug your own code is a beginning, but learning how to debug other people's code is more important as you have to figure out how they understood the problem & implemented their solution.