What errors are you getting? Admittedly, I have had a lot of errors with Xamarin, but it is working for me now. What version of windows are you using? Please provide details and perhaps I can help.

Instead of expanding all the nodes in quickwatch, you could just export the variable to JSON or XML using this Visual Studio Extension: Object Exporter extension[^]

http://www.cygwin.com/ or http://www.mingw.org/ both give you access to GNU C++. Another option if you don't like unix tools is djgcpp.