Inspecting STL containers in Visual Studio debugging

Question

If I have a std::vector or std::map variable, and I want to see the contents, it's a big pain to see the nth element while debugging. Is there a plugin, or some trick to making it easier to watch STL container variables while debugging (VS2003/2005/2008)?

Answer 1

If you want to watch more than one element at the same time, you can append a comma and the number of elements as so:

(v._Myfirst)[startIndex], count

However, note that count must be a constant, it cannot be the result of another expression.

Answer 2

For vectors, this thread on the msdn forums has a code snippet for setting a watch on a vector index that might help.