debugging desktop apps

General
1
  1. Monitoring some sort of output:

I know you can pop up message boxes all over the place (but they get annoying) and I have also added labels to windows and populated them with debug info, but is there somewhere I can output debug info like a consol.log, immediate or output window or somewhere that I can just spit out arbitrary information and scroll back up and around it?

  1. “Watching” more than one variable, especially one or more properties of one or more different objects at once. I just can’t seem to figure out how to do this.
2

  1. Yes! In fact, Xojo Engineers have said not to use Message Boxes to debug. They cause event stack changes, which can can cause issues. What you’re looking for is https://documentation.xojo.com/api/os/system.html#system-debuglog to send it to the Xojo debug output log. This panel appears when debugging, or if you have that option turned off you can show it manually by clicking the triangle ! icon in the bottom bar.

  2. You can’t “watch” a variable for changes with the debugger. You can make it a computed property and put a breakpoint in, but there’s no debugger functionality for “watching” :frowning:

3

I swear I looked high and low, I just found https://documentation.xojo.com/api/os/system.html#system-debuglog

as I was writing this I see @Tim Parnell 's answer popup. And oh, ok, for a moment I thought I was on to a winner, finding the “Messages” window. lol.

Thanks for those answer Tim, cheers