The primary purpose of any debugger is to display information about the state of the program being debugged and, in some cases, to modify that state. The Visual Studio debugger provides a variety of tools for inspecting and modifying the state of your program.
One of the least obtrusive tools is the DataTips pop-up information box. When your program is in a break state, you can view the value of a variable within the current scope by placing the mouse pointer over the variable in a source window. A DataTips pop-up box appears. To view the value of an expression, select the expression. DataTips pop-up information is not available for expressions outside the current scope or invalid expressions, such as division by zero.
For more detailed inspection of your program, the Visual Studio debugger provides a variety of windows and dialog boxes:
You can use... | To view... |
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Autos window |
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Locals window |
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This window |
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QuickWatch dialog box |
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Watch window |
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Registers window | Register contents |
Memory window | Memory Contents |
Call Stack window |
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Disassembly window | Assembly code generated by the compiler for your program |
Threads window | Information on threads (sequential streams of execution) created by your program |
Modules window | Modules (DLLs and EXEs) used by your program |
Running Documents Window | A list of documents loaded into the current process. |
Listing Commands | Using the Debugger