Is there a way to dump a stream from the debugger in VS

Question

I'm using VS 2010 and am working with a lot of streams in C# in my current project. I've written some stream dump utilities for writing out certain types of streams for debugging purposes, but I seem to keep stumbling across times when I am debugging and need to look into the stream I am debugging over, but I didn't put my dump calls in there. It seems like I should be able to dump the stream somehow just using VS or maybe tell it to call one of my dump methods on a stream in the debugger. Is there a wy to do this?

The streams I am working with have some text describing a blob of data and then the bytes of the blob, so looking at the description is useful. My dump methods typically just dump that information out and then skip the blobs.

Answer 1

Maybe you could write a Visualizer? MSDN explains how here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/e2zc529c.aspx

Answer 2

You could just use the immediate window to call your dump function while debugging:

MikeDsDumpFxn(whateverStreamIsActiveInThisContext)

If your function returns a string it will print right there as the result in the immediate window.