如何以编程方式在调试器中添加监视

Question

You can programatically add break (Debugger.Break()) and I do this in some places where it means something has gone wrong (instead of, or in addition to throwing exceptions).

In some cases, I would like to programatically add watch for certain variables. Can this be done somehow? At present the best I can come up with is

object foo = someObjectIWantToWatch;

This way, I at least have a reference to the object I want to watch in code, so I can mouseover that object to see its contents. But this is obviously a hack and I'm hoping to find a better way.

Question edited:

I have a big application, with asynchronous threads driven by various system events, but when something goes wrong, you want to browse all the data structures in the whole application, looking for any clues what went wrong. So at the top level, where the application launched from (Main()) creates an object which will contain everything else hierarchically, and Main() goes into an infinite loop.

while (true)
{
    Thread.Sleep(100);
}

So if the application begins misbehaving for some reason, you can just put a breakpoint there, and voila. You can browse all the data structures in the whole application. But only if you have a reference to the top level container object. You can mouseover the object and browse that way - but it's more convenient to have the object appear in Autos or Watch. So I would like to do something like

Debugger.Watch(theTopLevelObject);

Yes I can browse to and find the top level object, and right-click it, and add watch. But the actual declaration is nowhere nearby, hard to find when you're actually on the breakpoint.

Answer 1

I know this is not the answer to your question, but I'd like to point out that you can do a Debug.WriteLine(someObjectIWantToWatch) , and look in the Output tab to see what the value was. Also, could use a tool like DebugView to watch the Debug.WriteLine output without being in the debugger.

There may be an API in the Visual Studio Debugger Extensibility API or the Visual Studio SDK for adding Watch variables, but I didn't see one.