Visual Studio debugging “quick watch” tool and lambda expressions

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No you cannot use lambda expressions in the watch / locals / immediate window. As Marc has pointed out this is incredibly complex. I wanted to dive a bit further into the topic though.

What most people don’t consider with executing an anonymous function in the debugger is that it does not occur in a vaccuum. The very act of defining and running an anonymous function changes the underlying structure of the code base. Changing the code, in general, and in particular from the immediate window, is a very difficult task.

Consider the following code. 

void Example() {
  var v1 = 42;
  var v2 = 56; 
  Func<int> func1 = () => v1;
  System.Diagnostics.Debugger.Break();
  var v3 = v1 + v2;
}

This particular code creates a single closure to capture the value v1. Closure capture is required whenever an anonymous function uses a variable declared outside it’s scope. For all intents and purposes v1 no longer exists in this function. The last line actually looks more like the following

var v3 = closure1.v1 + v2;

If the function Example is run in the debugger it will stop at the Break line. Now imagine if the user typed the following into the watch window

(Func<int>)(() => v2);

In order to properly execute this the debugger (or more appropriate the EE) would need to create a closure for variable v2. This is difficult but not impossible to do.

What really makes this a tough job for the EE though is that last line. How should that line now be executed? For all intents and purposes the anonymous function deleted the v2 variable and replaced it with closure2.v2. So the last line of code really now needs to read

var v3 = closure1.v1 + closure2.v2;

Yet to actually get this effect in code requires the EE to change the last line of code which is actually an ENC action. While this specific example is possible, a good portion of the scenarios are not.

What’s even worse is executing that lambda expression shouldn’t be creating a new closure. It should actually be appending data to the original closure. At this point you run straight on into the limitations ENC.

My small example unfortunately only scratches the surface of the problems we run into. I keep saying I’ll write a full blog post on this subject and hopefully I’ll have time this weekend.

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