Did you know you have more than one Watch window in Visual Studio .NET 2003?  A co-worker was grumbling that there was no simple way to just pull up the watch window with a keyboard shortcut -He's a VB guy, not used to having more than one Watch Window.  I usually just use the Quick Watch (Ctrl-Shift-Q in my settings) so I dug a bit into the shortcut for Watch windows for him.

Here is the solution…

Go into Tools, Options.  Choose Environment/Keyboard.  Scroll the list box in the middle of the form on the right, down to "Debug.Watch1".  You will see the keyboard shortcut for bringing it up.  Notice there is also Watch2, Watch3 and Watch4 as well.  Now you can group your watches into separate watch windows for specific areas you are debugging.

By default, mine is Ctrl-Alt-W, 1 (Global).

This means that in order for me to bring up Watch Window #1, I hit "Control-Alt-W" all at the same time, release and then hit the number "1" key. Oh, the "Global" means that this applies to anywhere in VS.NET.  The watch window will only appear when it is relevant to do so, like when your actually debugging the application.

Happy Debugging!

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