Test and Debug a Visualizer
Once you have written a visualizer, you need to debug and test it.
One way to test a visualizer is by installing it in Visual Studio and calling it from a debugger window. (See How to: Install a Visualizer.) If you do that, you will need to use a second instance of Visual Studio to attach and debug the visualizer, which is running in the first instance of the debugger.
An easier way to debug a visualizer is to run the visualizer from a test driver. The visualizer APIs make it easy to create such a driver, which is called the visualizer development host.
Note
Currently, the test driver is supported only when calling the visualizer from a .NET Framework application.
To create a visualizer development host
In your debugger-side class, include a static method that creates a VisualizerDevelopmentHost object and calls its show method:
public static void TestShowVisualizer(object objectToVisualize) { VisualizerDevelopmentHost myHost = new VisualizerDevelopmentHost(objectToVisualize, typeof(DebuggerSide)); myHost.ShowVisualizer(); }
The parameters used to construct the host are the data object that will be shown in the visualizer (
objectToVisualize
) and the type of the debugger side class.Add the following statement to call
TestShowVisualizer
. If you created your visualizer in a class library, you need to create an executable to call the class library and place this statement in your executable:DebuggerSide.TestShowVisualizer(myString);
For a more complete example, see Walkthrough: Writing a Visualizer in C#.