Visual Studio, debug one of multiple threads

Single stepping through a single thread seems to be mostly fixed in VS 2012 (with some caveats you can see in my link below). Breakpoints are a pain.

Freezing and thawing threads is the usual workaround, as previous answers have stated, but it's tedious, and it can cause hangs when your thread waits on another thread that's frozen. These can be tough to recover from without losing your place in your thread of interest.

Another useful workflow is to apply a thread filter on your breakpoints, also stated in some of the answers:

Create a breakpoint, right click on the breakpoint, click Filter, and enter ThreadId = 7740 (your thread id from the threads window).

This can be very tedious.

My suggestion to Microsoft is to fix single stepping (and variations of it) to never switch threads unless an explicit breakpoint is hit in another thread. They should also add a shortcut (maybe Ctrl-F9) to create a breakpoint with the current thread id as its filter. This would make the second workflow much more convenient.

Vote up the suggestion if you agree this would be useful, or add your own suggestions:

https://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-studio/suggestions/8543248-make-the-debugger-stick-to-the-current-thread-inst

Yes.

In the Threads window (Debug -> Windows -> Threads) right-click the thread you want and select "switch to thread".

You can also choose "freeze" on the threads you don't want to debug in order to keep them from running. Don't forget to "thaw" them if you expect them to do work, however.

Further reading.