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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-04T20:41:22+00:00

I normally work with Qt Creator for my C++ needs. When an assertion in

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I normally work with Qt Creator for my C++ needs. When an assertion in my program fails, it can show me which assertion failed. In Visual Studio, I only see this:

Failed assertion

I can click Retry to jump into the application, but it doesn’t tell me which assertion failed. Even for a simple assert(false) Visual Studio tries to show me the source code for msvcr100d.dll, which isn’t available.

How can I find out which assertion in my program failed? I really don’t want to do a cumbersome manual search using a combination of breakpoints and std::couts for something that can be tracked down automatically.

Edit: Visual Studio did in fact generate a .PDB file for me, but it still isn’t working. Although the debugger won’t highlight the line with the failed assertion, I do see Assertion failed: false, file main.cpp, line 8 on the command line. Why can’t it just show me the line and let me inspect the variables? I mean, all the information appears to be available…

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  1. Editorial Team

    All you should have to do is click “Retry” to break into the application’s source code with the debugger. That will highlight the line containing the assertion that failed, so it’s easy to see the culprit unless you like to cram multiple nested assertions onto a single line. And if you do, then you deserve all the pain that this might cause you.

    The reason it’s not working for you now is more than likely because you don’t have the debugging symbols available from your application’s current build. When you build an app with the compiler bundled with Visual Studio, depending on your project settings, it will generate a .PDB file, which contains the debug symbols. These are required to get useful information while debugging, such as what line produced the last failure.

    Make sure that when you compile your application, you have it set to generate debug symbols. You should see a .PDB file in your /bin directory. As discussed here, the generation of debug symbols is orthogonal to whether optimizations are enabled (the configuration typically known as “Release”).

    Update: I just realized you’re probably compiling/building the app in Qt Creator, and then trying to debug the binaries from Visual Studio. That’s not going to work out well—if you don’t compile using VS’s tools, it’s not going to generate debug symbols that the VS debugger can read.

    I assume the problem would be the same in reverse: if you built with Visual Studio, then tried to debug with Qt Creator, it probably wouldn’t be able to interpret the debugging symbols, either.

    Therefore, I’d recommend sticking with a single toolset for building. It doesn’t matter which IDE you use, but you’ll need to compile/build with the same tools. You can configure either Qt Creator or Visual Studio to use the compiler and linker bundled with the other. Typically Qt Creator comes with a Win32 port of GCC, but it’s trivial to get it to build with Microsoft’s toolset instead, which would allow you to use VS to debug your code.

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