title: Can .NET source code hard-code a debugging breakpoint?
body: <p>I'm looking for a way in .NET (2.0, C# in particular) for source code to trigger a debugging break as if a breakpoint was set at that point, without having to remember to set a specific breakpoint there in the debugger, and without interfering with production runtime.</p>
  
  <p>Our code needs to swallow exceptions in production so we don't disrupt a client application that links to us, but I'm trying to set it up so that such errors will pop up to be analyzed if it happens to be running in a debugger, and otherwise will be safely ignored.</p>
  
  <p>My attempt to use <code>Debug.Assert(false)</code> has been less than ideal, and I assume that <code>Debug.Fail()</code> would behave the same way.  It should theoretically have no effect in production, and it does successfully stop when debugging, but by design there is (as far as I can tell) no way to continue execution if you want to ignore that error, like you could with an actual breakpoint, and like it would do in production where we swallow the error.  It also apparently breaks evaluation of variable state because the debugger actually stops down in native system code and not in ours, so it's debugging help is limited.  (Maybe I'm missing some way of getting back into things to look at the variables and so on where it happened. ???)</p>
  
  <p>I was hoping for something like <code>Debug.Break()</code>, but it doesn't seem to exist (unless maybe in a later version of .NET?), and no other <code>Debug</code> methods seem applicable, either.</p>
  
  <p><strong>Update:</strong> While ctacke's answer is the best match for what I was looking for, I have since also discovered a trick with Debug.Assert()--when running in the debugger--Pause the debugger, go to the code for the Debug.Assert call pending (highlighted in green because it is down in the framework code) and hit Step-Out (shift-F11), then hit Ignore in the assert dialog box.  This will leave the debugger paused upon the return of the assert (and able to continue execution as if it hadn't occurred, because it was ignored).  There may be other ways to do much the same thing (does hitting Retry do this more directly?), but this way was intuitive.</p>