This is one reason why I thought the C and C++ Builder products by Borland were quite strong. The 'properties' and the interaction with the forms were arranged such that the programming environment, the debugger and the application were as close to each other as possible.
The only other environment that manages to achieve this (and better) is smalltalk.
ps: the idea is that the state is made explicit, so the user knows where and what to diagnose.