Just wanted to introduce everyone to a great debugging tool, you can use with Visual Studio 2005.
It’s called DebugView.
You can find it at http://www.sysinternals.com/utilities/debugview.html
DebugView is an application that lets you monitor debug output on your local system, or any computer on the network that you can reach via TCP/IP. It is capable of displaying both kernel-mode and Win32 debug output, so you don’t need a debugger to catch the debug output your applications or device drivers generate, nor do you need to modify your applications or drivers to use non-standard debug output APIs.
Here’s a little example of how you would use it with Visual Studio 2005 Console Application
1. First Create a Console application in Visual Studio 2005
2. Then add the following lines of code to the program.cs file
3. Compile the application. Notice the Debug versus Trace writelines. The Debug output will only show up in Debug mode, whereas the Trace info will show up in Debug and Trace build.
4. Now you can start the DebugView client
5. Goto Visual Studio 2005 and run your Console Application by hitting SHIFT + F5 (to run the application without debugging). The console application will run, and you will see the following output in your DebugView
6. Now clear your display in DebugView by typing CTRL + X.
7. Change your build type to Release and run the console application again using SHIFT + F5.
8. Now you will only see the Trace output in the DebugView display.
That’s it. This gives you some insight into Debug versus Release builds, shows you what Trace version Debug writeline statements do, and finally gives you a way to show debug information without using Visual Studio debugger.
FYI – You can see I was using version 4.5 of DebugView
Hope this helps some of you with Debugging.