Re: [Boost-docs] [debugger_visualizers] wiki update

Subject: Re: [Boost-docs] [debugger_visualizers] wiki update
From: Cédric Venet (cedric.venet_at_[hidden])
Date: 2007-08-06 19:18:53

> AFAICT, these are not usable for many (most?) Boost classes. These
> visualizers are statically-typed; we need template-like visualizers.
> Sure it might be possible (haven't tried) to visualize each
> instantiation, but this is far from practical. Or am I missing
> something? After all, Microsoft themselves are visualizing STL classes
> using autoexp.dat, so I guess we're doing it right :-)

Yes, you are right.

> 
> Also, I think that the visualizers we've created so far are quite
> satisfactory, so I don't know why would you want anything more
> "advanced".

I didn't says they weren't, just you wrote on the wiki:

Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 is the first of the Visual Studio versions to support user-customizable debugger visualizers. For CLR languages, such as C#, the possibilities are even more powerful, and documented. Native C++ debugger visualizers are not documented, though it was claimed by some people from Microsoft that some docs are coming - so if you know of some, please let us know!

So I posted.

> 
> Did you read the discussion "[Boost-users] [multi_index] MSVS 2005
> visualizers?" at the boost-users mailing list, BTW?

I haven't subscribed to the users mailling list. Perhaps I should, but I was fearing the quantity of mail and a very bad signal/nose ratio.

> 
> Thanks for the links anyway, I haven't tried writing a "DLL" visualizer
> yet. We might use it for some Boost classes, such as ptime. However, we
> must first examine how does it integrate with the IDE (whether it works
> in the watch window, etc.). It might be that this feature no longer
> works in new VS editions, as there is a brand new visualizer API for
> CLR
> debugging.

The API has been upgraded for VS .NET and is reported to work on VS .NET 2005. And the CLR api will probably never be usable with c++ (not CLI) because it use CLR and associated technology (speculation) 

-- 
Cédric Venet