In Visual Studio can i plot my variable in breakpoint ?

Question

In Visual Studio for my native C++ program I want to get a plot of some variables during debug. Mostly I use textual representation of the objects by editing autoexp.dat. But for some of the variables it is better to have a plot rather than having values in textual form.

So far I have used a function plot(const void* address,const char* type) , and called it from Immediate Window giving the variable address & the type, and internally casting it to proper type.

But this method has two disadvantages:

• First is that, function overloading almost never works when calling a function from debugger (so I had to pass type as a second parameter), and the function call occasionally crashes, though it works perfectly when called from within code.
• Second is, instead of writing a C++ function for plotting, I am interested to have a scripting language (like autoexp.dat or a VBScript) to give the internal data of the C++ object without writing any wrapper, so that I can use the script to store the data in a file or plot it.

In general I am interested to have something like Matlab or Ch IDE, where I can plot certain variable externally when the program is at a debug break.

Answer 1

Since VS 2005, Visual Studio has included Visualizers, which could almost have been designed specifically for your problem. MSDN explains the concept better than I can:

Visualizers are a new component of the Visual Studio debugger user interface. A visualizer creates a dialog box or other interface to displays a variable or object in a meaningful way that is appropriate to its data type. For example, an HTML visualizer interprets an HTML string and displays the result as it would appear in a browser window, a bitmap visualizer interprets a bitmap structure and displays the graphic it represents, and so on. Some visualizers allow you to edit as well as view the data.

See here for a tutorial on how to write one.