Any serious program, even if it is a small one, will probably use data structures. Even if Visual Studio.NET 2005 has an excellent integrated debugger that can be used to inspect objects while debugging, some of this data structures are difficult and time consuming to debug. If we create our own data structures, it is more difficult to debug them, as we have to inspect the internal fields of the class in order to figure out what’s happening.

Visual Studio.NET 2005 provides a new feature called Debugger Visualizers, that can make inspecting objects a lot easier and faster. The StructsViz package contains a collection of graphical visualizers for the .NET data structures, showing a diagram of the data structure being debugged. Also, there is a graphical visualizer for trees, an invaluable feature to make debugging tree based algorithms something simple.

If you want to create a Visualizer for your own data structure, StructsViz offers a plethora of classes to create a visualizer for your own class in just a few minutes. For a comprehensive listing of all the features of the StructsViz package and some images of it in action, take a look at the Features page.