I’m the last person to praise Microsoft – with the amount of money they bleed from the human race, there is no room to give them any slack. To their credit, corporations of their magnitude almost always decay into bureaucracy and inefficiency, and they could be worse. Case in point, Visual Studio. It kicks ass. Here’s a quick rundown of what it does for me when debugging my Qt app. This is in comparison to Qt Creator, which is awesomely streamlined and elegant. But when you are debugging, every bit of comfort is gold:
- if you set things up as i did, you can step right through the Qt source with no pain
- the watch window takes far fewer steps to manipulate
- the debugger can dereference pointers better
- the debugger can dereference iterators better
- code completion in the editor can also handle dereferenced iterators
- debugger can show long strings much better
- you can step over a function back up to the caller without dropping to the next line of code in the call routine (for when multiple calls take place on one line)
- debugger doesn’t head south when often browsing out of array bounds (inevitable if you are watching variables)
I’ll add to this list as seems fit. I should probably also start a list of the advantages of Qt Creator, it is really nice to work with on linux and Mac. Including Eclipse would round out the list nicely… but for now, back to teh coding. :> Check out this recent post for instructions on getting VS set up with Qt, it’s easy.
