DebugHelp Devstudio Add In

Introduction

The Visual C++ IDE helps up perform common, repetitive tasks with Macros and Add-Ins. Through AddIns we can programmatically manipulate Visual C++ environment and it's components. Thus Add-Ins are basically DLL Components that use Automation (formerly OLE Automation) to communicate with the VC++ environment.

Debug Help is a Visual C++ 6.0 AddIn that helps developers insert debug statements in their program code. It was developed to automate frequent insertion of debug statements (TRACE and OutputDebugString) and thus reduce typing time and related RSI. The real inspiration for such a tool were my fellow developers ('Debugging is ****, man') at NIIT during our coding sessions. This is good karma. :-)

Full source code is provided along with the AddIn. You can modify this to insert other blocks of code that you find useful.

Installation

To install DebugHelp-

• Copy DbgHelp.dll to your Microsoft Visual Studio\Common\MSDev98\Addins directory (Visual Studio 6.0).
• Open Visual Studio.
• Goto Tools->Customize->AddIns and Macro Files.
• Click to check on DebugHelp AddIn.
• Click Close

How to use

Using DebugHelp is really simple. First position the cursor where you'd like to insert the debug statement and click on the AddIn toolbar button to bring up the Options dialog box. Now type the text you want to output in the edit box, choose the format (TRACE or OutputDebugString) and click on Insert Code to insert the respective debug statement with your text. Use TRACE with MFC applications and OutputDebugString for Win32.