Printing nice looking object graphs in the Visual Studio Debugger

Question

I need to print out an easy to read object graph from Visual Studio because I need to show a customer the state of an object at runtime.

Are there any debug visualizers for this? Expanding everything in a quick watch window isn't easy enough for the customer to comprehend.

Answer 1

If you are on Visual Studio 2010, take a look at "GCRoot via DGML" extension - http://blogs.msdn.com/mohamedg/archive/2010/03/02/visual-gcroot-via-dgml.aspx.

Answer 2

If you can get by with only one or two key properties. Then you could make use of the DebuggerDisplay attribute a top a class declaration to make formatted text display in the debugger quickwatch line or mouse hover over.

E.g.

[DebuggerDisplay("Applicant - Name = {DisplayName}, EntityId = {EntityId}")]
public class Applicant
{
}