Do you know a managed equivalent to '@eax'?

In the unmanaged development world, you could observe the DWORD return value of a method by typing '@eax' into the watch window of the debugger.

Does anyone know of an equivalent shortcut in managed code?

Related point: I have learned that VS2008 SP1 supports $exception as a magic word in the watch window. Are there any other shortcuts that you know of?

From stackoverflow

• I'm not sure if this is quite what you mean, but there are some other keywords that you can have printed out for tracepoints:

    $ADDRESS      address of current instruction
    $CALLER       name of the previous function on the call stack
    $CALLSTACK    entire call stack
    $FUNCTION     name of the current function
    $PID          process ID for current process
    $PNAME        name of the current process
    $TID          thread ID for current thread
    $TNAME        name of the current thread
  

• That list is excellent! Where did you get it?

  The @eax part of my question concerns this situation:

  Let's say you have this method in your code.

  public int MyFunc()
  {
     return FnA() + FnB();
  }
  

  In unmanaged C++, you could put a breakpoint on the closing curly brace, type @eax in the watch window, and you would see the result of 'FnA() + FnB()'.

  A workaround is to assign the return value of MyFunc() to a variable and to type the name of the variable into the watch window.

  public int MyFunc()
  {
     var result = FnA() + FnB();
  
     return result;
  }
  

  While this is quite easy to do, not everyone does it. @eax was a great way to see the return value before you exited any function that returned a DWORD.

  Thanks a lot for that list!

• @EAX in managed code is a little tricky to implement since CIL has higher-order primitives for function returns (which happen semantically on the virtual execution stack).

  That said, if your function is returning a value type and that type's size is less than or equal to 32-bits, then the @EAX will most likely still give you that value. (You may need to switch on mixed-mode debugging in order to see registers, I don't remember off the top of my head.) This of course falls apart for reference types, large value types, and inlined functions.

  In short, I wish this was built into the debugger too!

• The watch window tricks like @eax are called [Psuedovariables]. They are actually documented. I wrote a blog post about this and some other VS debugging items a few years ago. Format specifiers are typically highly useful.

  For your specific question there is no psuedo variable for eax in managed code. There is however a register window which will actually have EAX and the other registers in it. It is questionable that this will be useful in many situations as I don't believe there is any way to cast the address to a managed type. You can however look at the layout in the memory window