Debugging *this*

I recently had some issues with vscode and its TypeScript debugger when trying to read the content of the this variable. The debugger printout of the value of a variable when hovering above the variable - but the this variable was undefined.

I believed it was my closures that were not correct, thus making me replace all my functions with fat arrows. This was however not the case, since the application ran perfectly in node.

The issue turned out to be that this was not correctly source-mapped to _this. Recall that this within a TypeScript class is compiled to _this such that calling context issues are avoided. The debugger however failed to grasp the concept, making the mouse-over fail.

One has to manually expand the Closure in the debugger tab in vscode and look for _this if within a fat arrow calling context.