The original page of this article is: http://www.inframez.com/papers/d3d_autoexp.htm
Visual Studio comes with a nice debugging feature called Auto-expand. With this feature, you are able to inspect important values of your structures in the IDE's Watch windows.
The feature covers structures, classes, and even HRESULT error codes, thus you no more have to switch to some error lookup tool just to find out what that HRESULT is.
Microsoft has added this feature in Visual Studio 6.0 and above. We are allowed to add 'Autoexp' entries to customize how the IDE will show us information the way we like. This is done through a file named 'autoexp.dat', and it's included in the IDE's debugger directory.
What interests us, DirectX programmers, is to have the IDE show us all relevant information about DirectX's structures and error codes.
The attachment with this article contains an additional set of definitions just for that case. After installing those definitions, Visual Studio will auto-expand many of Direct3D and D3DX structures, in addition to the ability to show the name of any HRESULT returned by a DirectX component (including DirectDraw7 and DirectSetup).
Setting up Autoexp.dat for DirectX
- Download the DirectX definitions from this article (autoexp_directx.dat).
- Open your IDE's autoexp.dat file in a text editor. Note that the directory this file can be found in changes from one version to another, so you might want to do a search in the root folder of Visual Studio for the file.
For Visual Studio .NET (2003 and 2005), this file can be found in:
<%VS.NET_Root%>\Common7\Packages\Debugger - Copy the text from autoexp_directx.dat which falls under the [AutoExpand] section, up to the [hresult] section, and paste it in your IDE's autoexp.dat file right under the beginning of the [AutoExpand] section. This will allow the debugger to show expanded variable information in the variable watch windows.
- Copy the text from autoexp_directx.dat which falls under the [hresult] section up to the end of the file, and paste it in your IDE's autoexp.dat file right under the beginning of the [hresult] section. This will make HRESULTs appear in a text form instead of just raw numbers.