Utilizing the virtual pointer table address seen in Visual Studio debugger

Question

Many a times in Visual Studio for C++ we get the vfptr or the vptr address of a class visible in the debugger. In Visual Studio we can also analyze memory of the thread through the in built memory views. But the information visible there is in binary.

Is there some way I can get more information about the class type or any other useful information through the virtual pointer address for debugging purposes?(Considering the fact that we can analyze the memory itself through this address in Visual Studio)

Answer 1

If you expand the class in QuickWatch or Variables window , you can see class details in ascii like so.

Here you can see that the class is of type Foo and has a virtual table with one function called bar

Answer 2

I'm using it for my custom RTTI. It's easy to extract the vf pointer and it's unique for each class (of course you need at least 1 virtual function in your class). In visual c++ and recent gcc and llvm it's first longword of the class on 32-bit architectures. It's not safe to play like this and if you don't have a genuine need you should probably not do that.