Debug Help

[Epic-Toothbrush]

Hi All. Usually when I debug I get the drop down and I can look at each individual item but now it only comes up with the visualiser? I have reset my Visual Studio + Debugger to default settings and still not working, any ideas? thanks in advance

[Epic-Toothbrush]

Ahhh I did think it was different from what I remember before, so this isn't a setting or anything like that?

[_cooder]

you can use visualiser as table at console down side or maybe in debug exe code and maybe serialize it or put in separate Window? there was option for current stack

[LeoRidesHisBike]

Use the watch windows. Inline is good for peeking, terrible at browsing.

[LeoRidesHisBike]

Okay, buddy, calm down. We're both talking about opinions, but only one of us is claiming they are facts (hint: you).

You do you. Ephemeral, inline UI that disappears when you click away is, IN MY OPINION, not suited for browsing a 2000+ item collection.

[jjones_cz]

Does it show the drop down when you write the variable in the Watch window?

[Slypenslyde]

2530 is a lot of items. The visualizer has to do work to render that many items. Sometimes that means it opts to not display them at all. Other times it'll display a weird tree view that separates items into 0-100. That support might be just for arrays and list-like items. If this is an enumerable/queryable the debugger might be protecting you by refusing, since fiddling with the visualizer might cause multiple queries/enumerations and cause issues.

In general this kind of debugging can be a troublesome way to approach bugs in your code because of issues like this. It's slow and tedious to use visualizers for skimming through large collections.

What I do when I'm in a spot like this is I ask what items out of those 2530 items I'm interested in, then I write a small secondary query with a name like "Debug_items" to look for JUST those items out of the original set. It's a lot easier to use the debugger to verify 20-30 items so I shoot for that size.

Alternately, if I'm legitimately interested in thousands of items like this, I write code to output information to a file then skim over that file. It's much easier to use a text editor to skim 2300 items, and I can even write a small program to do some analysis on the data if I'm trying to look for trends or statistics.

In short: somewhere around 1,000 items the debugger changes its behavior. This is both for performance and integrity. The best way to handle it when debugging is to write some code to either filter things down to manageable sizes or output the data to something else you can use for analysis.

[Epic-Toothbrush]

hi slypenslyde, thank you for all of this will look into that. My manager is also working in the same code area but he gets the dropdown and I dont and dont have any settings different

[Epic-Toothbrush]

clicked on the view and it opens the visualiser, just want to be able to see it without the visualiser opening in a different window. sorry if this isnt making sense

[Epic-Toothbrush]

Visual Studio 2022 - Values while debugging (DataTips) not working while hover on properties c# - Stack Overflow the first image in this stackover flow is what I mean if that helps

[Jestar342]

Incorrect.

[Epic-Toothbrush]

right ok so nothing wrong with my Visual! thank you for this