Visual Studio Tips and Tricks
Detecting Exceptions
A common problem is that an exception is thrown somewhere in the code and we can only put a breakpoint in the catch part at which point we have lost the stack information of where the exception originated from and finding that out can be cumbersome.
should be checked
If that checkbox is selected, Visual Studio will break every time a C++ exception is thrown. In most of our code, exceptions are only raised when something bad happened, which shouldn’t be too often (famous last words), so it is a good way to detect the source location of the exception.
Breaking on floating point exceptions
Sometimes numbers break, for example float x = std::sqrt(-1.0) would store as a NaN, which would then propagate further into other calculations. Finding the source error of this can be very tedious and cumbersome as it involves a lot of (assert(x == x)).
Doing this somewhere early in the program:
#include <float.h>
_clearfp();
_controlfp(
_controlfp(0, 0) & ~(_EM_ZERODIVIDE | _EM_OVERFLOW),
_MCW_EM
);
Will cause exceptions to be thrown everytime an overflow or a division by 0 occurs anywhere in the code.
Disabling optimizations for a particlar part of code
When running OpenSpace in RelWithDebInfo the compiler applies optimizations throughout the code, which makes it difficult to look at individual variables as they might have been optimized away.
Adding pragma optimize ("", off) to the top of a file will disable all optimizations only for that file and will preserve all variables, etc.
Command Palette
Visual Studio also has a command palette, which is accessible through CTRL+T. Different prefixes in the search bar allow you to filter for files (f:), types (t:), or members (m:).