I was intrigued, as many were, with Mohammed Barqawi's DataSet QwickWatch add-in over on The Code Project. The thought of leveraging the expression evaluator to populate a form for visualization purposes during a debugging session was compelling and, over the holidays, I decided to see how far I could take the idea. As it turns-out, it is actually quite amazing how much you can do with strings and an AppDomain.CurrentDomain.Load() call! Once I had this nut cracked, everything else fell-together pretty quickly and after a few weeks of furious coding and a small round of beta testing, I decided to release the XML Visualizer for Visual Studio .NET 2003 (XMLVIZ) to a (much!) larger audience.
WHAT DOES XMLVIZ DO?
Basically, XMLVIZ allows you to visualize most XML and XML-backed data sources during runtime a la Whidbey's "debugger visualizers". The difference is you don't have to wait for VS.NET 2005 because XMLVIZ will work with your copy of VS.NET 2003 today! XMLVIZ is implemented as a VS.NET add-in and, once installed, is activated by highlighting any supported, initialized type instance during a debugging session, right-clicking on the selection to bring-up the context menu, and selecting the "XML Visualizer" menu item. The add-in will then grab the XML out of the selected target instance and display it on a modal dialog along with the schema (if available). For ADO.NET types, the data is also bound to a grid to allow navigation, row-filtering, and row version inspection.
WHAT TYPES CAN I VISUALIZE?
Currenly XMLVIZ supports the following types (including derived types thereof):
DataSet,
DataTable (including detached tables),
DataRow/DataRow[]/DataRowCollection (attached rows only),
DataView (including DataViews over detached tables),
DataRowView/DataRowView[] (attached rows only),
DataViewManager,
Exception,
XPathNavigator,
types implementing IXPathNavigable,
well-formed XML in strings,
any XML-serializable type
To give you a better idea, here are some screenshots of XMLVIZ in action:
