I can't go a day without hitting that "play" button... and entering the debugger. I can assure you that it is anything but play that I'm doing when I run it. The quick watch window is pretty clueless when it comes to complex types such as the ubiquitous dataset. When you want to inspect the values in it, you end up drilling down ad-nauseam into the stupid structure. !@#%!&#%, I hate that! I'm lucky to drill down far enough on the right node to find what I'm looking for... and when I do, I forget why I was looking in the first place (curses to my small buffer - at least I have a pretty fast CPU).
RickSP brings us good news about VS2005 in his article, Typical Usability Problems with Debugging in C#:
Usability Breakdown: Inspecting Complex Types
Often, when a user is debugging a framework object, for instance a Dataset, the actual data that the user wanted to find was essentially inaccessible because the debugger simply showed the internal data structure. So if you wanted to see what data was in a Dataset that you filled, you had to dig way down into the watch window, and hope you could find the information you needed.
The debugger team's solution to this problem was Visualizers. I think Visualizers will save developers countless hours of debugging. (Again, if you haven't seen these yet, Visualizers provide a way to display information about an object on a Win Form, so developers can focus on the interesting part of the data. For example, if you are debugging a program that uses a dataset, you can view the data in the dataset in a grid, since this is usually what you want to know when debugging. Visualizers are an additional debugging method, you still have the ability to look at the dataset in a debugger window as before.)
Now a dataset will actually be visible on a popup WinForm in a datagrid, sweet! Now if Whidbey will give us C# guys the same IDE experience as VB.NET, I'll be set. ;)
posted @ Sunday, February 06, 2005 3:04 PM