Roadmap for extending the debugger

Applies to: Visual Studio Visual Studio for Mac

Note

This article applies to Visual Studio 2017. If you're looking for the latest Visual Studio documentation, see Visual Studio documentation. We recommend upgrading to the latest version of Visual Studio. Download it here

This documentation provides guide and reference information for extending the Visual Studio debugger with the Visual Studio SDK.

Visual Studio debugging documentation includes samples, a comprehensive reference, and several representative scenarios that demonstrate typical ways to customize the debugger.

Your compiler and its output determine what's required to set up debugging in your product. If your compiler:

• Targets the Windows native operating system and writes a .PDB file, you can debug programs with the native code debug engine (DE), which is integrated into Visual Studio. You don't need to implement a DE or expression evaluator. The expression evaluator is written for the syntax of the C++ programming language.

• Produces Microsoft intermediate language (MSIL) output, you can debug programs with the managed code debug engine DE, which is also integrated into Visual Studio. Thus, you need only implement an expression evaluator. A sample expression evaluator is provided for you. For more information, see the following topics:

  Expression evaluation

  Evaluating expressions

  Expression evaluation context

  Expression evaluation in break mode

  Write a common language runtime expression evaluator

• Targets a proprietary operating system or some other run-time environment, you need to write your own DE. A tutorial that creates a simple DE using ATL COM is provided. For more information, see the following topics:

  Create a custom debug engine

  Tutorial: Build a debug engine using ATL COM

  Implement a port supplier

  Samples

See also

• Get started