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The Locals Window

The Locals window is another valuable debugging tool closely related to the Watch window that also inexplicably has no built-in keyboard shortcut that can be used to display it. In place of that you can use the standard menu hotkey sequence Alt+V followed by an s character.

The Locals window can be thought of as a specialized version of the Watch window that automatically displays the names, values and data types of all variables and constants that are local to the procedure currently being executed. The Locals window for our debugging session in the PostTimeEntriesToDatabase procedure is shown in Figure 16-22.

Figure 16-22. The Locals Window in Action

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Like the Watch window, you can use the Locals window to change the value of any variable in the watch list. There are also two unique features provided by the Locals window:

Quick access to the call stack
The button in the upper-right corner of the Locals window directly below the X-close button will display the call stack window and allow you to change the scope of the variables being displayed in the Locals window to any other procedure in the call stack.

The Module Variables entry
If you look closely at the first line in the Locals window, you'll see that it has the same name as the module within which the current procedure is executing. If you expand this entry it will display a list of values for all module-level variables and constants.