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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-16T07:35:37+00:00

I know that might sound like a stupid question since it’s a trivial feature

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I know that might sound like a stupid question since it’s a trivial feature in most modern IDEs, but I’m diving into iOS development and am getting familiar with the platform and SDK and I can’t figure this out. I have a ton of experience with MS Visual Studio and I see that Xcode works very much the same, tho it’s still lacking quite a bit of functionality in comparison, but still a very good IDE. When it comes to debugging, Xcode works very similar to Visual Studio in that you can hover your mouse over a variable and it will display its current value. When it comes to object variables, however, it almost always give just the address along with the expand arrow, which expands to “NSObject”, which expands to “isa”, which expands to all the attributes that don’t tell me anything. I’m used to the IDE, like Visual Studio, being smart enough to do some introspection and display for me the actual object and all it’s immediate properties and values. I’m assuming Xcode is smart enough to do this and I’m just not using it correctly.

If I set a breakpoint on a line of code that involves an object instance (lets say NSDateComponents instance), how can I view the values of its properties (i.e. year, week, day, hour, etc.)?

Thanks in advance for your help!

Edit: Here’s a screenshot of the info I get with every object I inspect…
alt text http://joecrotchett.com/images/misc/example.jpg

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    It’s frustrating. The debugger has to know the structure of every object and it apparently doesn’t. It used to be much worse, though. Like with NSArray’s, they’re an array of objects. The debugger doesn’t know what type of objects specifically, and that’s due to the Objective-C language, not the debugger.

    As you dive into iOS development, I think you’re going to find that Apple is about 15 years behind its competitors when it comes to development. That’s no joke. But they’re catching up and, trust me, it used to be much worse!

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