The title says it all really. I'm on VS2013 and am beginning to think this is a bug. In particular, even the following code (which is illustrative in its functionality) gives me the class name from the base class (gsl::window) instead of derivedwnd:

<Type Name="gsl::window">
<Expand>
<Item Name="[class]">((derivedwnd*)this)->_className,na</Item>

</Expand>
</Type>

Both classes contain a static _className member that is returned via an overloaded GetClass() procedure. Since Natvis can't invoke functions, I need to access the data member directly. However I can't find any information on this particular situation.

Can anyone confirm this a bug/feature of Natvis or know of a workaround?

Try something like:

((derivedwnd*)this)->derivedwnd::_className

Thanks for the input. Unfortunately it doesn't work. And even if it did, it wouldn't solve the real problem, which I probably left a bit unclear: I don't actually know the type of the derived class.

Basically, I want to write a rule for all classes derived from gsl::window (which should automatically be the case), but retrieve _className stored statically in each derived type.

The short answer is I don't think you can do that.

In order to use a member of a derived-class object, the debugger has to know what class to interpret the memory as. It can do this in limited situations by inspecting the vtable pointer of the object itself, but I'm not aware of a way to turn that back into something that natvis can use.

If you have some weak guarantee like "_className is always the 0th member of the object and thus exists immediately after the vtable pointer" you can find it by doing the pointer arithmetic by hand, but if you have multiple base classes this falls apart very quickly.

Yeah, I figured as much. Thanks for confirming.