Autoexp.dat not working in Visual Studio 2005?

  • Article

As this was reported twice in the space of a week internally, I figured that external users may be hitting this too. The internal emails were along the lines of "I added my custom types to autoexp.dat and they don't work". In both cases this was because they were added at the end of the file, but if you look carefully at the 2K5 default version of the file the end is in the [Visualizer] section: auto expand rules need to be in the [AutoExpand] section.

There are close to no official docs on this file, sorry, that was kind of my fault. If VS-next still doesn't have any docs, it will be someone else's fault.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    March 29, 2006
    No, it'll still be your fault.  I promise.  :)

  • Anonymous
    April 19, 2006
    I tried with the example located in MSDN, unfortunately this didnt work  
    Example documentation was not very clear as well. I have found some blogs where people complained that unless a complete path is specified the custom dll is not loaded

    Srikanth B

  • Anonymous
    April 20, 2006
    Srikantb: Are you referring to the EEAddIn sample? Yes, a complete path to the DLL is required. If you supply more details (e.g. what does "didnt work" mean?) I will try and help.

  • Anonymous
    April 20, 2006
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    April 21, 2006
    Looks like the VS2005 Sample is broken: see this thread for the fixes: http://www.codecomments.com/Debugger/message840933.html

  • Anonymous
    May 16, 2006
    It seems, that COleDateTime isn´t supported by autoexp.dat. Because COleDateTime is shown as m_dt=38853.724988425929, I added a function to EEAddin sample. I wanted to format it as string like "dd-mm-yyyy", but nothing happens. All my other data types work fine.

    Has anyone an idea?
    Regards, Frank

  • Anonymous
    May 16, 2006
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    May 16, 2006
    Thanks for the tip. The type is now ATL::COleDateTime. That´s the difference to VC6.
    Regards, Frank

  • Anonymous
    August 03, 2007
    Are you aware of non-managed data-type simply disappearing out of debug when running and debugging a managed code?  A made a simple structure and added to autoexp.dat. When not running managed code it works. When running mixed code, I think it ignores the hint.

  • Anonymous
    October 11, 2007
    Thanks for yor excellent description of how auotexp.dat works. I did as you said and moved my user definded types to the right block, [auotexpand] and now it works fine.

  • Anonymous
    February 26, 2009
    PingBack from http://thetweaker.wordpress.com/2009/02/26/2d-matrix-watch-introducing-autoexpdat/