We all know that Visualizers are a great feature of Visual Studio 2005 debugger UI. It gives us a really nice meaningful way to look at the data.
Visual Studio also enables us to create Custom Visualizers using DialogDebuggerVisualizer class. A long time back Howard van Rooijen had created a great tool using visualizers.
There are 4 in-build visualizers available with VS 2005 among which only the dataset visualizer is editable and rest all are read-only visualizers. This gave a thought to
how can I make a custom visualizer editable ?
The answer is : Simply using the ReplaceObject method
public class NewTextVisualizer : DialogDebuggerVisualizer
{
override protected void Show(IDialogVisualizerService windowService, IVisualizerObjectProvider objectProvider)
{
String sourceString = objectProvider.GetObject().ToString();
Form1 form = new Form1();
form.txtData.Text = sourceString;
windowService.ShowDialog(form);
sourceString = form.txtData.Text;
//Replaces the debugee object with the debugger object.
if (objectProvider.IsObjectReplaceable)
{
objectProvider.ReplaceObject(sourceString);
}
}
}
Above is the normal code for creating a custom visualizer which uses the ReplaceObject method. This method replaces the object provided with the edited object, which makes this an editable visualizer.
(Added end result preview) :
I have attached a sample solution with a custom Text Visualizer just to make sure that this works. For more details on creating and deploying visualizers Click here.
-Jomit