.NET/Winforms: need an example for a nice UI for exception displaying

Question

I'm writing a little developer tool which will (among other things) display exceptions thrown from the code that the tool is currently inspecting. Since it is a developer tool I would like to display as much information about the exception as possible (at the least type, message, stack trace and a recursive InnerException) and do it in a way that is easy to comprehend and analyze.

Unfortunately I cannot think of a nice UI for this. Are there any good examples out there? I have access to DevExpress components if that helps.

Answer 1

Whatever you do, make sure that the developer can copy and paste all the relevant information!

Answer 2

Well the Visual Studio one does a fair job! I can't seem to upload an image from this PC, but there's an image here if you haven't seen it.

Everything shown in a dynamic table/tree-like structure, you can drill down into inner exceptions etc, everything is copyable, and there are expandable viewers for certain things (e.g. stack traces). Not pretty, but functional.

Answer 3

Starting with the VS display, I'd look for:

• omit null values (such as HelpLink == null, or InnerException==null)
• Don't nest InnerException, it's basically a stack so represent it as such
• In StackTrace, you could make the file name clickable (or at least easy to pick out and copy).
• In StackTrace, Emphasizing the actual class and function name to make it stick out from the full namespace and signature garble.
• Some more data reduction is possible, e.g. exception type displayed twice, but this takes careful handling not to swallow information either

You could consider a HTML view, either making it interactive by catching clicks, or using javascript.