These debugging annoyances have occurred for as long as I’ve been using RS and XOJO.
I know I should have reported them but nobody else seemed to complain so maybe I’m fussy.
When you stop at a breakpoint to examine the contents of a recordset in the Variables window and then leave the contents of the recordset on display the IDE will crash when you continue.
When you want to examine the properties of a window’s control the list of controls isn’t in alphabetical order and the column won’t sort. In a complex program it’s very hard to find the control name on the list.
these does not happen to me.
but smetimes with the recordset, the debugged app quits, but it is after some minutes of step-by-step.
if I start over at the same place, it does not occur again.
When looking at large arrays or dictionaries, there is no “lazy loading”, so that one could start to scroll down. You have to wait and wait and wait… and then sometimes Xojo crashes.
When walking up the hierarchy you are positioned at the start of the debugger listbox, not at the row you selected. For example if you have an array of objects and you move to array element 500 and the you drill down to check the properties of this object and you then “drill up”, you are at element 0 of the array instead of element 500. Very annoying.
I’ve seen all of these are various times. Yes, they are annoying. You can report them but the future is 64-bit and they are working on that now (and the next half a year or so). I expect to see a better debugger since they’re writing it from scratch.
Joe Ranieri asked a couple of really pointed questions at XDC last week about how we’d like to see Watch Points used (no promises he said). He also mentioned that the debugger user interface would get some new things (but declined to be more specific). At XDC they also said that the IDE would be going 64-bit only at some point next year so it makes no sense to spend the time and effort to redo the 32-bit (and archaic) debugger that has 15+ years of cruft on it.
Just to be clear- the first iteration you see of 64-bit debugging is not going to look much different. It is not a complete rewrite. There are a lot of internal changes to enable it- things we simply could not bring over from the existing internals- and that has taken a while. But given what we’ve said- we are obviously pushing to make things more useful for all of us going forward…