Question

Many Qt classes uses pimpl, so they’re very opaque to VS’s debugger.

This is bothersome when I want to check some internal Qt state to see if my code is doing it wrong or if I’m having wrong expectations of how things stand.

I’m using the Qt VS add-in (1.1.0), but that doesn’t seem to help.

Any ideas?

Update

My autoexp.dat file is filled with Qt stuff, but I’m still not able to look inside the heavier classes (QWidget, QTcpSocket, etc).

I can see the simpler classes contents, so the autoexp.dat below seems to be working, but trying to look inside a QWidget doesn’t work.

Update 2

For some reason, after reading comments and looking more, it does work, and I can see the data stuff.

I don’t know what happened in the mean time (when I just worked and ignored it), but I did have problems seeing the data before.

I’m accepting the “just works” answer, because I can’t delete a bountied question and that’s the closest answer available. (The autoexp-dat just pretty-formats the debug lines, using data that’s already visible if one digs down)

Answer 1

It’s definitely possible to look into the pimpl when Qt is compiled with debugging information. Not sure about VS, but with gdb it Just Works™.