Native end-and-continue option breaks quickwatch

[nick6]

Hi,

Has anybody else noticed that enabling native edit-and-continue in VS2012 seems to break the watch functionality (both quickwatch and the watch tool window) in fortran projects?

Unfortunately I need this option to enable edit-and-continue in our C++ components, but now I cant debug fortran. Although strangely the 'locals' window does still show some variables and their values, but not all variables are listed.

Any ideas? Thanks.

[Steven_L_Intel1]

I wasn't aware of this - I know that edit-and-continue disables Fortran traceback, but it shouldn't affect debugging.  I will try some experiments.

[Steven_L_Intel1]

I can reproduce this. I had not encountered this new VS2012 feature before. Very odd that it interferes with the Fortran debugging.  I will let the developers know, I do note that MSDN says that this option disables some debugger expression viewer enhancements, which may include disabling of alternative expression evaluators.

[nick6]

Thanks for looking into it Steve. I guess for now I'll have to disable it if I need to debug fortran code, but hopefully a fix can be found soon.

[Steven_L_Intel1]

It's possible that there's nothing we can do, as it looks to me as if the Fortran expression evaluator is not even being called. But we'll see.

[Steven_L_Intel1]

Sorry, our hands are tied on this. As hinted by the text on the options page, VS doesn't even call the Fortran debug expression evaluator and we have no control over that. I am mystified, though, that I can't find any documentation by Microsoft that describes this new feature. Can you explain what it does and why it is important?

[nick6]

Steve,

Edit-and-continue allows us to make changes to the code at run-time when the debugger is paused and automatically recompiles the change, relinks and resumes execution without having to stop the program. In our case, this saves us a LOT of time when debugging since our program contains 60+ projects with a lot of dependancies.

I dont know why the native option was added, but without it we can not use edit-and-continue in our C/C++ projects.

[Steven_L_Intel1]

I know what normal edit-and-continue is - MSVC has had that for a long time. But this "native" option is new and I can't find a description of what is different about it.

[nick6]

Ah ok, I misunderstood your question. I have no idea either, other than its required for edit-and-continue to work in C/C++. I've spoken with a microsoft support engineer and they couldnt tell me either. If I manage to find any details I'll let you know though.

[Steven_L_Intel1]

It might have to do with using EAC on an x64 program, given that VS is still itself a 32-bit application. I think you can still use EAC without the "native" option set - at least you've been able to do that for several VS versions.