LPL Debugger

One of the most painful things about programming has always been debugging. I myself am a big fan of breakpoints and stepping. But I have to admit that it has its disadvantages one of them being unable to have the program run without your attention.

So one night I got a crazy idea, which was about using a console application as a roll-screen for program messages, this would enable the user to run a program and then print certain messages on this screen e.g. “Now running procedure TestMe”. Well as it turned out you can’t send messages to a consol application so I decided to use a standard win32 application and richedit to provide the roll screen effect and then I was in business.

Over the first version I have tried to make it easy to use the system by providing the heavy coding to the debugger in a unit, leaving you with just having to run procedures.

From your application you implement the routines required to communicate with the debugger all of which is supplied in the unit called “LPL_Message.pas”. And then the rest is done using windows messaging system to communicate between the applications.

To ensure that only one application is using the debugger at a time I had to make the debugger communicate back to your application and therefore you will have to write some code in your application to recognize and process these messages since it can’t be done from the unit.

First your application has to contact the debugger to determine whether or not it’s free for use. Running the procedure ”Dial” in the included unit does this. Then the debugger will send a message back to your application telling you if it’s free or not. You should trap your program until you have received a respond and then store the result for use in the rest of the program session.

The LPL Debugger program has a couple of functions to give you an extended use of it. These functions are a stay-on-top to enable you to see the debugger screen at all times, a clear the message screen this will help you to list a single process on the screen which holds up to 16 lines at time and the last function is a save function so you can save all the messages to a file for later comparison and whatever comes to mind. These features can be access by right-clicking on the roll-screen.

The debugger will send a message to the current application that is using it prior to it’s termination, your program should always recognize this message and display a message to the user if this happens, seeing that windows just might shutdown the debugger.