I'm looking into writing an addin (or package, if necessary) for Visual Studio 2005 that needs watch window type functionality -- evaluation of expressions and examination of the types. The automation facilities provide
Debugger::GetExpression, which is useful enough, but the information
provided is a bit crude.
From looking through the docs, it sounds like an
IDebugExpressionContext2 would be more useful. With one of these it
looks as if I can get more information from an expression -- detailed
information about the type and any members and so on and so forth, without having everything come through as strings.
I can't find any way of actually getting a IDebugExpressionContext2,
though! IDebugProgramProvider2 sort of looks relevant, in that I
could start with IDebugProgramProvider2::GetProviderProcessData and
then slowly drill down until reaching something that can supply my
expression context -- but I'll need to supply a port to this, and it's
not clear how to retrieve the port corresponding to the current debug
session. (Even if I tried every port, it's not obvious how to tell
which port is the right one...)
I'm becoming suspicious that this simply isn't a supported use case, but with any luck I've simply missed something crashingly obvious.
Can anybody help?
