Debugging data in 'anonymous namespaces' (C++)

Question

Recently, I got a crash dump file from a customer. I could track the problem down to a class that could contain incorrect data, but I only got a void-pointer to the class,

Answer 1

This is mentioned in MSDN. It doesn't look like there's a nice solution within the Watch window (you can get the decorated name of your class from a listing I guess).

Your "silly-named namespace" idea would work okay, you could also just declare an identical class with a silly name and cast to that type instead.

Answer 2

Referencing anonymous namespaces in Visual Studio Debugger's expressions is not supported (at least as of VS 2017) and it's really annoying.

From https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/debugger/expressions-in-the-debugger#c-expressions

Anonymous namespaces are not supported. If you have the following code, you cannot add test to the watch window:

namespace mars
{   
    namespace  
    {  
        int test = 0;   
    }   
}   
int main()   
{   
    // Adding a watch on test does not work.   
    mars::test++;   
    return 0;   
}