Thursday, February 09, 2006

Viewing Long Strings in the Visual C++ 6 Debugger

On my dev team at work, we still use Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0 to build and debug several of our server components. The VC++ debugger does not inclue a mechanism for viewing long strings -- the Watch panel is limited to showing the first 252 characters of a string.

I found a nice VC++ 6 add-on this afternoon that allows an entire string to be viewed and/or copied to the clipboard, called StringWatch. The author's homepage for the add-on appears to be no longer available, but the add-on is available from this page on CodeGuru.

Installing the add-on was a painless process -- I just followed the instructions given in the included index.html file. I didn't need to restart Visual Studio or even end the debugging session that I had in progress.

I'd recommend this add-on to anyone who needs to view long strings (such as SQL or MDX statements) while debugging in Visual C++ 6.

1 comment:

  1. Hi, you can find latest StringWatch version here if you need one

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