Better display of wxTypes in MSVS debugger

Posted on December 22, 2009 by Vadim Zeitlin

This is a quick note about displaying a few wx types in MSVS (2003 and later) debugger as I just discovered, to some surprise, that some people using wx don’t know about it. Let me show what I mean with an example: I have the following in my %VSINSTALLDIR%\Common7\Packages\Debugger\autoexp.dat:

[AutoExpand]
; ... all the existing stuff ...
; wxWidgets types
wxPoint=<x>,<y>
wxSize=<x>*<y>
wxRect=<x>,<y> <width>*<height>
wxDateTime=<m_time.m_ll>ms
wxLongLong=<m_ll>
wxString=<m_impl>

This allows to see the contents of the variables of the types above in a much better way than the default display (e.g. by default tooltips for wxRects only show x, y and width values but the height is truncated – hardly convenient). I wonder if others have more types to add to this list?

Of course, there are limits to this approach. For example, I’d really prefer to see an ISO 8601 representation of wxDateTime instead of the number of milliseconds since the Unix Epoch which is currently shown. But this probably requires writing a custom visualizer which is a bit more difficult (would anyone have done this already by chance?).

Still, debugging is much nicer when previewing wxStrings is as simple as hovering a mouse over them so if you don’t have the above in your autoexp.dat you should really add it there. Just remember that wxString expansion is for 2.9, if you are using 2.8 you need to use <m_pchData,s> instead.