Patent ID: 7650593

Claim:
A computer-implemented attributed debugging system comprising: a processor; system memory; a debugger that facilitates debugging of a computer software application, the debugger obtaining from a computer user one or more attributes for attributed debugging, the attributes comprising keyword-like tags provided by the computer user which are configured to annotate various programming elements to indicate whether the computer user desires the elements to be displayed and, if so, how the computer user desires the elements to be displayed during debugging, the attributes including values of one or more properties of an object of the computer software application, the debugger being configured to allow the computer user to specify for each runtime object which object information is to be displayed and how that object information is to be displayed using attributes; an expression evaluator, associated with the debugger, that examines a display proxy in place of the object to determine debug information related to the object, the display proxy is implemented as a private nested class of the object, the display proxy is configured with specified values to expose a subset of the one or more properties of the object, the subset excludes implementation-specific properties of the object; and a variable display component that presents, to the computer user, those specified values associated with the subset of the one or more properties of the object exposed by the display proxy, wherein only those values specified for display by the computer user are displayed and wherein the specified values are displayed in the manner indicated by the computer user.