Visual Studio has these cool things to help you in your debugging, called Visualizers. They help you see beyond the code and into the data, using a custom dialog or interface. And while there's a number in the box, they can't build one for everything.

But Visual Studio being what it is, you can create your own...

Visual Studio Visualizer: Part 1

Add a Visual Studio Visualizer to look data from: 

• Dataset; 
• DataTable; 
• DataRow; 
• DataView; 
• DataRowView; 
• DataRowCollection.

Using the code

Visit the project home page, download your flavor (2010 or 2012), unzip, and place the DLLs in the right folder, Documents\Visual Studio xxxx\Visualizers. 

When debugging with VS there is a extra option for visualizer, for the DataSet, DataTable, DataRow, and DataView objects. 

Points of Interest

For some reason arrays are not allowed for visualizing within visual studio debug, but when using the VisualizerDevelopmentHost class to test the visualizer, an array is allowed.

This project shows a work around to make a non-serializable object available to our custom visualizer. 

Create a visualizer

This project was created using visual studio express, any edition can be used.

First create a class library project then add a reference to the Visual Studio Visualizer API, the DLL can be found on: (Visual Studio installation folder)\Common7\IDE\ReferenceAssemblies\v2.0 Microsoft.VisualStudio.DebuggerVisualizers.dll. 

Add references to the types of objects, the visualizer will receive:

[assembly: System.Diagnostics.DebuggerVisualizer(
    typeof(DSVisualizer), typeof(VisualizerObjectSource), Target = typeof(DataSet), Description = "My DataSet Visualizer")]
[assembly: System.Diagnostics.DebuggerVisualizer(
    typeof(DTVisualizer), typeof(VisualizerObjectSource), Target = typeof(DataTable), 
    Description = "My DataTable Visualizer")]
[assembly: System.Diagnostics.DebuggerVisualizer(
    typeof(DRVisualizer), typeof(DataRowVisualizerObjectSource), 
    Target = typeof(DataRow), Description = "My DataRow Visualizer")]
[assembly: System.Diagnostics.DebuggerVisualizer(
    typeof(DVVisualizer), typeof(DataRowVisualizerObjectSource), 
    Target = typeof(DataView), Description = "My DataView Visualizer")]
[assembly: System.Diagnostics.DebuggerVisualizer(
    typeof(DRVVisualizer), typeof(DataRowVisualizerObjectSource), 
    Target = typeof(DataRowView), Description = "My DataRowView Visualizer")]
[assembly: System.Diagnostics.DebuggerVisualizer(
    typeof(DRCollectionVisualizer), typeof(DataRowVisualizerObjectSource), 
    Target = typeof(DataRowCollection), Description = "My DataRowCollection Visualizer")]

This can be inside any cs file of the project, but it must be outside any namespace declaration. As you can see, some types use VisualizerObjectSource and others use DataRowVisualizerObjectSource, this is because the DataRow type needs some massage before we can use it, this is covered later.  

The class that will get the object to visualize must inherits from DialogDebuggerVisualizer. 

This will allow to override the Show method: 

...

Visual Studio Watchers

This project contains some visualizers to work with Visual Studio.

Currently this project has visualizers for:

• DataSet
• DataTable
• DataRow
• DataView
• DataRowView
• DataRowCollection

There next visualizers will be for entity framework objects (trying to do a visualizer for all custom objects), StringBuilder, string and XDocument.

Introduction

Place the dll's in the right folder, Documents\Visual Studio xxxx\Visualizers.
When debugging with VS there is a extra option for visualizer, for the DataSet, DataTable, DataRow and DataView objects.

DataSet

The dataset visualizer mainpage, show a tree and a datagrid. In the tree all of the datatables are available:

...

And as you expect the source for all this is available too...

This screencast assumes knowledge of the C++ AMP API, e.g. that you totally understand the matrix multiplication implementation in C++ AMP. So if you satisfy that prerequisite, watch this screencast on what features are available in Visual Studio 2012 for debugging C++ AMP code.

To learn more please visit the C++ AMP blog, and we encourage C++ AMP questions in the Parallel Computing in C++ and Native Code MSDN forum.

Read more about this feature on this blog post: MPI Cluster Debugger.