A gridview for debugging collections?

Question

I'm working with fairly large generic collections and I need a quick way to view all the items and their properties in these collections while debugging.

When I say view all the items, I mean I would like to view the collection as if it was bound to say.. a gridview. That way I could see all the item properties listed.

Currently VS2010 displays the collection object during debugging, but it takes several clicks before I can view any item's properties within the collection. As I'm using collection with 50 to 100 items in them, I've having a hard time getting a feel for the collection data because of having to click through to view each individual item's properties during debugging.

Do you have any ideas or know of a visual studio plugin that can help display collections in a table format or gridview format?

Thanks for you time

Answer 1

I found this debugger visualizer for lists and dictionaries on codeproject. It includes the source code, so you should be able to modify for your needs if not enough.

Answer 2

There is a great MSDN article with varying examples on how to modify the way in which the data is displayed within the Visual Studio debugger.

Specifically I think you might want to take a more in depth look at Visualizers; note the HOW TO's on the left hand side and bottom.