Professional Visual Studio® 2008

43.3. Visualizers

The last part of this chapter looks at a concept in Visual Studio 2008 that can be used to help debug more complex data structures. Two of the most common data types programmers work with are Strings and DataTables. Strings are often much larger than the area that can be displayed within a tooltip, and the structure of the DataTable object is not suitable for displaying in a tooltip, even using a type proxy. In both of these cases, a visualizer has been created that enables the data to be viewed in a sensible format.

Once a visualizer has been created for a particular type, a magnifying glass icon appears in the first line of the debugger tooltip. Clicking this icon displays the visualizer. Figure 43-7 shows the Text Visualizer dialog that appears.

Figure 43.7. Figure 43-7

Before you can start writing a visualizer, you need to add a reference to the Microsoft.VisualStudio.DebuggerVisualizers namespace. To do this, right-click the project in the Solution Explorer and select Add Reference from the context menu. You should also add this namespace as an import to any classes for which you plan to create debugger visualizers.

A visualizer is typically made up of two parts: the class that acts as a host for the visualizer and is referenced by the DebuggerVisualizer attribute applied to the class being visualized, and the form that is then used to display, or visualize, ...