Visual Studio 2019 cannot view static variables defined at App level in Watch window

Question

I have a Xamarin Forms app in Visual Studio 2019 and I have several static class variables defined in the App.xaml.cs file. I use these variables through out my application. However, when I am on a page of my app and add a property of the Static Class variable to the watch window, I receive the error message:

Watch Window Entry:

App.gvm_WaitingList

Error:

error CS0103: The name 'App' does not exist in the current context.  

This makes it very hard to debug when I cannot see the values of properties in these static classes. Here is how the variable is defined in the App.xaml.cs

public static VM_WaitingList gvm_WaitingList;

and then I initialize it in the App constructor as follows:

gvm_WaitingList = new VM_WaitingList();

In searching for a solution I did find talk about the immediate window and adding global:: before the item I want to watch. However, when I do that I get the following error:

Watch Window Entry:

global::App.gvm_WaitingList 

Error:

error CS0400: The type or namespace name 'App' could not be found in the global namespace (are you missing an assembly reference?)  

Any ideas how to get this to work?

Answer 1

I finally found a way to see these variables. If I prefix the variable in the watch window with the namespace, it will resolve the variable in the watch window. Here is the solution that fixed my problem:

(NOTE my namespace is UniversalCheckInHost) Watch Window Entry:

UniversalCheckInHost.App.gvm_WaitingList

I hope this helps someone else.