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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