This feature is coming in Rider 2020.2!

“This can’t happen!” - Ever scratched your head where an object’s property is not what you would expect, and there doesn’t seem to be a good reason why that is?

Data breakpoints, sometimes called “watchpoints”, are helpful when you need to focus on a particular object’s properties. You will typically use them in scenarios where you know what will change, but have no idea where the change comes from in your code base.

Here’s an example. There are 3 instances of Account, and we’re adding a number of transactions to them. I would like to pause execution when the number of transactions in “Account 3” changes.

We could have set a breakpoint inside of List`T (Rider does support debugging external libraries), or at a location where we know the value for the property will be changed. But that would pause the application for changes to all instances, not just for a specific one!

Instead of enduring constant, irrelevant breaks when there are multiple objects of the same type, you can use data breakpoints to pause when a property of a specific object changes, and then investigate further.

#data visualization