Making the Visual C++ 6.0 debugger not ‘step in’

When debugging your code, it is likely that at some point you have
accidently stepped in ‘too far’. Whether it was into the constructor
for CString or even just a piece of code that you’ve already debugged
and *know* works, it’s a pain to have to keep switching back and forth
between doing ‘step in’ and ‘step over’.

Thankfully, the debugger gurus at Microsoft seem to have seen this
problem, too. As a quick warning, this feature is not documented and
was just ‘mentioned’ by Andy Pennell in his presentation entitled
‘Power Debugging with Visual C++ 6.0’, given at the Boston ’99 Visual
C++ Developer’s Conference. It also only works in Visual C++ 6.0.

Open up your autoexp.dat file — in CommonMSDev98Bin — and add a
new section named ExecutionControl to the end of the file and then add
lines of the form: function=NoStepInto


[ExecutionControl]
CString::CString==NoStepInto
CString:::operator==NoStepInto

These three lines will cause the debugger not to step into the CString
contructor or assignment operator. As is standard for any
modifications to this file, you have to shut down and reload Visual
C++ for this to take effect.

Date Last Updated: April 24, 1999

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