Questions about debugging with Visual Studio

I've successfully created a project, added my files to it, and Built it. I have a couple of questions about my efforts to Debug after setting a breakpoint of interest:

a) When I select Debug, I get the warning message:
"Debugging information for 'myfile.exe' cannot be found or does not match. Binary was not built with debug information. Do you want to continue debugging?"

--> Did I do something wrong when Building my project? What can I do to solve this warning message? Is this a serious problem that will prevent me from successfully debugging, or could I ignore it with no consequences?

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b) What I'm trying to do is to run the code until the breakpoint, and then step through the code, beginning at the break point, while I observe the values of several arrays and variables. However, I've searched through all of the menu options, and I can't figure out how to select/display the particular variables/arrays of interest. Can you please tell me how to do this?

Thanks in advance for your help.

Make sure you're building the debug version, and not the release version.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Salem

Make sure you're building the debug version, and not the release version.

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How can I do this? How do I know which one is the debug version & which is the release version? And which file are we talking about -- an executable that gets generated by the Build process?

I just remembered that I'm supposed to delete the executable that I had previously generated using Cygwin. I did this, then Build --> Clean Solution, and then Build --> Build Solution again, and now that I don't have my pre-existing .exe file available, my Build process *fails*, with the message, "1>Project : error PRJ0003 : Error spawning 'cmd.exe'."

Any suggestions about why my Build process is failing? If I need to provide more info, please let me know what's needed.

It's been a while since I last used VS, so you might need to experiment a little.

As I recall, there was a drop-down list with either "Win32 - Debug" or "Win32 - Release" which set the default target rule when you did a build.

Failing that, do a "Build->batch build" and you can have complete control over exactly which targets you build.

Thanks, Salem; I will use the Batch Build option in the future.

For everyone's reference, I found this link that discusses the Build error I've been receiving:
Beta 2 error, Project : error PRJ0003 : Error spawning 'cmd.exe'.

I hope that one of the solutions suggested here works; I've tried one so far, no luck yet...