Marius Bancila’s Blog

I’ve recently discovered a new nice feature in the natice debugger of Visual Studio 2008: the visualization of bit flags.

Let’s take this enumeration for example. Notice that each constant is basically a bit flag.

enum Weekdays
{
   Monday = 1,
   Thuesday = 2,
   Wednesday = 4,
   Thursday = 8,
   Friday = 16,
   Saturday = 32,
   Sunday = 64
};

If we used those bitfields like this:

int _tmain(int argc, _TCHAR* argv[])
{
   Weekdays weeekend = (Weekdays)(Saturday | Sunday);

   return 0;
}

The debugger shows them like this:

However, if the constants are not bit flags, they are not shown. If you declare the enum like this:

enum Weekdays
{
   Monday,
   Thuesday,
   Wednesday,
   Thursday,
   Friday,
   Saturday,
   Sunday
};

you won’t get that in the debugger.