Debugging Preparation: Win32 Projects

Let's say someone's given you some code in a plain .cpp file, and you want to compile it with Visual C++ 2005 and look at its guts while it's running. This is a process called "debugging", and with an empty VC++ project, it at times has to be turned on manually.

Debugging Preparation: Win32 Projects: "Open the Linker node, and select Debugging. In the first Generate row, select Yes (/DEBUG) from the drop-down list. Always set this when you are debugging."

Good advice, Internet.