Inspecting Your Program

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 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 the debugger is in break mode, 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 debugger provides a variety of windows and dialog boxes:

You can use... To view...
Autos window
  • Variables in the current statement and previous statement
Locals window
  • Local variables
QuickWatch dialog box
  • Variables
  • Any valid expression recognized by the debugger
Watch window
  • Variables
  • Any valid expression recognized by the debugger
Call Stack window
  • Names of functions on the call stack
  • Parameter types
  • Parameter values
Running Documents Window A list of documents, script code, that are loaded into the current process.