I released the first version of this tool back in April - and have spent a couple of days this week working on a Global List management tool for the Scrum Plug-in - which involved a lot of XmlDocument debugging - so I decided to update the Visualizer so it would work in the RTM version and added some new features too.
For those of you who have missed this excellent new feature in Visual Studio 2005 you can find more information out at Scott Nonnenberg's blog, but in summary, Visual Studio 2005 has really nice debugger features, DataTips are one, but Debugger Visualizers are another. A while ago I wrote an Xml Debugger Visualizer using the Lithium tree control.
Visualizers are associated with different CLR types and are a means of displaying complex type information. The Conchango Xml Visualizer is registered against the XmlDocument type. In the screenshot below a breakpoint has been hit – if you mouse over the globalList variable a DataTip will appear – if you click on the spy glass icon you will launch the associated visualizer. If you select the down arrow icon (as pictured), a menu listing all available Debugger Visualizers for that type are displayed and you have to select the one you want to use.
This spawns the Xml Visualizer:
There are a few new features in this release:
- You can move the Xml tree around the screen, by holding down the shift key and clicking and dragging with the mouse.
- You can also right click on the nodes, where you will have an option to:
- View the raw Xml of the node
- View the raw Xml of the document
- Save the raw Xml of the node
- Save the raw Xml of the document
You can get the binaries from my Project Distributor workspace:
Once you have downloaded the zip file, extract the contents and compile (in Release mode) then copy Lithium.dll and Conchango.XmlVisualizer.dll to the following directory:
C:\Documents and Settings\YourProfile\My Documents\Visual Studio 2005\Visualizers\
To scroll around the visualisation, hold down Ctrl and click and drag with the mouse.
Updated 06/11/2006: If you are trying to locate the Netron Project see my post "What happened to the Netron Project?"