Craig Stuntz’s Weblog

I just came across an interesting use of non-breaking breakpoints. I was debugging a context menu and needed to see when the TPopupMenu.PopupComponent property was assigned. A regular breakpoint doesn’t work so well for this since it interferes with the display of the menu to have the IDE pop up. So I wrote some code like this in the OnContextPopup handler of the form:

var
  popupcomp: string;
begin
  if Assigned(pmnuPageGroupFrame.PopupComponent) then begin
    popupcomp := pmnuPageGroupFrame.PopupComponent.ClassName;
  end else begin
    popupcomp := '';
  end;
end;

Then I put breakpoints on both of the assignments, clicked Breakpoint Properties, and un-checked Break. I put MessageBeep(MB_ICONHAND) in the Eval expression of one and a different beep in the other, and turned off logging on both.

It works OK. The feedback is nice, but it isn’t synchronous. The beep is often delayed until I click back to the IDE or do something else in the app. But that was good enough to answer the question I had. It did make me wonder how accurate non-breaking breakpoints really are for lightweight profiling, though.

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