Windows Developer Power Tools

15.12 Simplifying Debugging with Visual Studio 2005 Visualizers

Visual Studio 2005 provides an excellent debugger that makes it easy to step through your code, examine the values of variables, and quickly find and squash bugs. The one downside is that when examining variables, it is often difficult to find what you are looking for in the rather generic tree view provided by the debug windows. Sure, it’s easy to see the value of an int, but if you’ve ever tried to get to the values in a DataSet, you know that you have to follow the tree down four or five levels before you can ever find a value. When dealing with large strings, you often have to copy them out to another program before you can actually read them. All of these are minor annoyances that add up to less effective debugging.

Visualizers, a new feature in Visual Studio 2005, solve this problem by providing a better view into variables, and in some cases increased functionality. This article introduces three custom visualizers that will save you time and help you debug your programs: Regex Kit Visualizers, ASP.NET Cache Visualizer, and Conchango Xml Visualizer.

Regex Kit Visualizers at a Glance
Tool	Regex Kit Visualizers, ASP.NET Cache Visualizer, Conchango Xml Visualizer
Version covered	Numerous
Home page	http://tools.osherove.com/Default.aspx?tabid=187 http://blog.bretts.net/?p=11 http://blogs.conchango.com/howardvanrooijen/archive/2005/11/24/2424.aspx ...