Visual Studio's Memory window: Inspecting a reference instead of the referenced value?

Question

When I inspect a string variable text using Visual Studio's Memory window, I get to see its value:

Out of curiosity, is there a way to inspect (also in the Memory window) the location where that value gets referenced?

(Of course I can already see the memory location's address. I am asking this because I am curious how the CLR represents, and works with, class-type instances. Based on what the CLI specification states, I am assuming that the CLR represents them at least as a combination of a pointer, a type token, and a value. I am seeing the latter two above, but would like to see the pointer, and what else might be stored along with it.)

Answer 1

In general there's not just one location, especially since this is an interned string. But you do have one since you know that the text variable points to the string. So use the address-of operator to get the address of the reference, type &text in the Address box.

You'll probably want to make it a bit more recognizable, right-click the Memory window and select "8-byte integer". You'd see 000000000256D08. The area of memory you are looking at is the stack of the main thread.

Do beware that this is all a bit academic. This works because you are using the debugger and the jitter optimizer was disabled. In an optimized program, that pointer value is going to be stored in a cpu register. And in the specific case of your test method there would be nothing to look at because the assignment statement will be optimized away.

You can see the "real" code with the Release build and Tools + Options, Debugging, General, untick the "Suppress JIT optimization" option. Beware that it makes the debugger stupid, it no longer knows much about local variables. The most important debugging windows then are Debug + Windows + Disassembly to see the code and Debug + Windows + Registers to see the CPU registers. Right-click the latter window and tick SSE2 so you can see the XMM registers, the x64 jitter likes to use them.