Question

I want to know, is there any way in Visual Studio 2008 to set a value breakpoint kind of a thing ? Like say there’s a variable called ‘test’, and I want to the code to stop at any line in the entire project where the value of this variable is being changed .. ?

That is, I don’t want any line specific breakpoint .. I just want Visual Studio to stop at the line of code where a change is being made to some variable ..

The code I have is very complex and it would be a lot easier for me to debug the code if I can get the mentioned functionality somehow ..

Answer 1

You should encapsulate the variable in a property so the field named test becomes _test or mTest or whatever and you create a new property called test that other code will use. You can put the breakpoint on the setter of the property.

So instead of having

public int test;

You can have

private int _test;

public int test
{
  get { return _test; }
  set { _test = value; } // Breakpoint goes here.
}

And there’s no need to alter any of the users of test, unless they’ve already been compiled in which case you’ll need to compile them again.