Visual Studio Hacks

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Chapter 5, Debugging

#43 Write a Custom Visualizer

HACK

As you can see, the visualizer provides an easy-to-understand view of the

data contained in the DataSet.

Write Your Own

By this point, you may be thinking, “Hey, I have complex types that I use all

the time and I wish I could write a visualizer for them.” Well, you can. In

this section, I am going to cover how to do exactly that by writing a visual-

izer for a simple class called

Car that includes four properties with the fol-

lowing names:

CarID, CarMake, CarModel, and EngineType. Because I need to

reference the same class from both the visualizer and the application, I am

going to put this class in its own project called

CarLib.

The first step is to create a new Class Library project in the language of your

choice. I am going to call the project

CarVisualizer. After creating the

project, the next thing you need to do is create a reference to the Microsoft.

VisualStudio.DebuggerVisualizers.dll, which can be found on the .NET tab of

the Add Reference dialog. This assembly contains all of the interfaces and

classes that you will need to create a custom visualizer.

Figure 5-34. Visualizer icon

Figure 5-35. DataSet Visualizer

Write a Custom Visualizer #43

Chapter 5, Debugging

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Create the visualizer form. The next step is to create a new class, ...