Advanced Breakpoints (Visual Studio)

Invoke

Oxygene's advanced breakpoint facilities are available via the bottom items of the breakpoint context menu.

"When Hit..."

When this option is first selected for a breakpoint, you see the following:

The Print a message option provides a tracing facility and you can reference variables and fields as you wish.

Uncheck Continue execution if you wish this to act as a normal (or advanced) breakpoint. Left checked, the breakpoint icon changes to a diamond to signify that no break occurs.

"Filter..."

You can set the certain process or thread for the breakpoint.

"Hit Count..."

There are times when stopping the first or every time that a line is executed is just not enough and the dialog invoked provides more control:

There are four options available:

• break always (the default): this acts like a normal unconditional breakpoint and, at first glance, may appear pointless. However, the breakpoint may have "When hit…" enabled and you may want to keep this while removing the count condition.
• break when the hit count is equal to: only breaks a single time, once the hit count is reached. Set it to 1 to break (or trace) the first execution of the line only. Set it to a high value if you are concerned that a loop may not be terminated as quick as you expect.
• break when the hit count is a multiple of (illustrated above): this option is particularly useful for tracing methods that get called many times.
• break when the hit count is greater than or equal to: use this to defer breakpoint enabling until a line has been processed a certain number of times.

"Condition..."

This option allows you to set condition, on which a breakpoint will hit.

"Location..."

This option allows you to set a breakpoint within a different file, but defaults to the current file.

If you change the line number in the current file, the breakpoint will jump to the appropriate place.

Setting the Character value other than one is only useful if your code contains multiple expressions per line.