Hi Dale,

being able to step through the code with the debugger is something you should get comfortable with so I would look at this as an opportunity. Visual studio makes it very easy. Set break points in your page load, page init and other events, open Web.config file in VS (this is just to make sure it starts at the home page and doesn't try to launch your custom code first) then press the play button to launch the debugger. When the site comes up navigate to the page where your custom feature is and it should stop execution at the first breakpoint it encounters, then you can step through the code using the F11 key and inspect variables as the code executes to see where and when their values are changing.

Hope it helps,

Joe