One of the coolest new features in VS 2005 is Debug Visualizers, which allow you to "see" various data as it is being debugged in your IDE. For example - you can see a dataset presented as a real table in a grid (just like this thing does today). The cool part is that you can create your own viewers for your custom types.

 

The main problem - you can't add viewers for built-in types - adding a viewer to a type requires putting a special attribute on it - so unless you have the source code for the CLR you won't be able to add any such thing to any class you'd like to debug more easily. That's a shame, which is why I added this suggestion to the MS feedback center.

 

For example, one of the things I wanted to do with the next version of The Regulator, is have it ship with built in Debug Visualizers for the Regex and Regex.Match objects for easier expression debugging when needed.

That's not possible with what's going to ship (although it was possible in the earlier betas...) but it would be possible if this suggestion is accepted.

 

Microsoft should also consider the huge market this could create - a set of 3rd party vendors who create custom and powerful visualizers for CLR types of all sorts (including BizTalk visualizers for example..? with runtime editing? hmm..)

 

 

Problem Statement:	Opened by Roy Osherove on 2005-04-13 at 14:08:19     You can only create debug visualizers for custom types that you create, by adding an attribute on them, but you can't create more robust or non existing debug visualizer types for CLR types such as Dataset or the Regex.Match object.
Proposed Solution:	Allow creating debug visualizers on any type including CLR types in an easy manner. This would allow 3rd parties to thrive in a new area and allow developers to create visualizers for intrinsic code they use a lot that does not have good visualizing ability.