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Is there a way in VS2008 to search through a watch or a quickwatch for a particular value?

Answer 1

+2 A:

It sounds like you want a conditional breakpoint:

When the breakpoint location is reached, the expression is evaluated and the breakpoint is hit only if the expression is true or has changed.

Create a new breakpoint, right-click on it, and select "Condition..." Enter the condition you'd like to wait for. It'll be something like:

this.MyString == "Hello World"

EDIT: Ok, I understand now you want to interrogate another, running application. Assuming it was built in a managed language, you may be interested in Hawkeye:

Hawkeye is the only .Net tool that allows you to view, edit, analyze and invoke (almost) any object from a .Net application. Whenever you try to debug, test, change or understand an application, Hawkeye can help.

Free. Not been updated in a while.

Michael Petrotta 2009-12-01 02:02:09

Thanks for your answer Michael. Unfortunately this isn't what I'm trying to acheive. I've added more detail to my question if this helps :)

Iain Fraser 2009-12-01 02:30:54

+1! Hey, Hawkeye looks awesome, I'll try that for sure. But I should have told you before, I'm actually working with ASP.NET application (i.e. a website) so there's nothing for me to drag the pointer on to as such. :)

Iain Fraser 2009-12-01 02:56:09

Try pointing at the iis process. It is debuggable (thats how you can debug asp.net applications)

Gregory 2009-12-07 22:37:36

Answer 2

A:

It sounds like you are envisioning a feature which would descend down the tree presented in the debugger UI looking for a typed in value. This is not a feature of the debugger at this time (although at first glance it sounds handy). It would have problems though in cases where the expression had infinite expansions.

Circular references for instance will cause an infinite expansion. Those are fairly easy to track down but there are more nefarious tricks which can be done to make infinite expansion harder / impossible to track. True we could probably control for depth and such ...

I think your best bet is to write a reflection based searching mechanism with a depth control mechanism. Then call this API from the debugger window.

JaredPar 2009-12-01 05:58:17

Answer 3

+1 A:

I wrote this the other day. It did the job well enough (however it is only some utility code for debugging, so use at your own risk --> the design is pretty bad >_< ). Dumps out the fields and iterates downwards. It might not be perfect, but it solved my problem at the time.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Reflection;
using System.Text;

public static class Dumper
{
    public class Dump
    {
        public Dump(bool spacesInsteadOfTab)
        {
            _spacesIndeadOfTab = spacesInsteadOfTab;
        }

        private readonly StringBuilder _sb = new StringBuilder();

        public string Result
        {
            get
            {
                return _sb.ToString();
            }
        }

        private readonly bool _spacesIndeadOfTab;

        private int _currentIndent;
        public int CurrentIndent
        {
            get
            {
                return _currentIndent;
            }
            set
            {
                _currentIndent = value > 0 ? value : 0;
            }
        }

        public void IncrementIndent()
        {
            CurrentIndent += 1;
        }

        public void DecrementIndent()
        {
            CurrentIndent -= 1;
        }

        private void AppendIndent()
        {
            if (_spacesIndeadOfTab)
                _sb.Append(' ', _currentIndent * 4);
            else
                _sb.Append('\t', _currentIndent);
        }

        public void Log(string logValue)
        {
            AppendIndent();
            _sb.AppendLine(logValue);
        }

        public void Log(string logValue, params object[] args)
        {
            AppendIndent();
            _sb.AppendFormat(logValue, args);
            _sb.AppendLine();
        }
    }

    public static Dump TakeDump(object objectToDump, int maxDepth)
    {
        Dump result = new Dump(false);

        int currentDepth = 0;

        TakeDump(ref result, ref currentDepth, maxDepth, objectToDump);

        return result;
    }

    private static void TakeDump(ref Dump result, ref int currentDepth, int maxDepth, object objectToDump)
    {
        currentDepth++;
        if (currentDepth > maxDepth)
        {
            result.IncrementIndent();
            result.Log("MaxDepth ({0}) Reached.", maxDepth);
            result.DecrementIndent();
            return;
        }

        var objectType = objectToDump.GetType();
        result.Log("--> {0}", objectType.FullName);

        result.IncrementIndent();
        var fields = objectType.GetFields(BindingFlags.Public | BindingFlags.NonPublic | BindingFlags.Instance);

        if (fields.Count() == 0)
            result.Log("No fields");

        foreach (var fieldInfo in fields)
        {
            var fieldValue = fieldInfo.GetValue(objectToDump);

            if (fieldValue == null)
                result.Log("{0} is null", fieldValueType.FullName, fieldInfo.Name);

            var fieldValueType = fieldValue.GetType();

            if (fieldValueType.IsValueType)
                result.Log("{2} as {0} (ToString: {1})", fieldValueType.FullName, fieldValue.ToString(), fieldInfo.Name);
            else
                TakeDump(ref result, ref currentDepth, maxDepth, fieldValue);
        }
        result.DecrementIndent();
    }
}

Gregory 2009-12-01 06:13:29

Thanks Gregory. This tool comes closest to answering my question and given that VS doesn't seem to have this functionality, I may just try doing this myself. Gotta love helper classes :) Well done

Iain Fraser 2009-12-07 05:05:30

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Is there a way in VS2008 to search through a watch or a quickwatch for a particular value?

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