Visual Studio is very rich with debugging tools and we always use debug windows for troubleshooting issues.

Debug windows gives  us the access to view values of objects and option to edit the same. Lets say I’m working with an object, which is having large number of members in it. Now when I debug I required only few of them and the other member object values are not that much important for me. In this case I will be facing some difficulties to see the required member object in in the debug hierarchy. Which indirectly wasting my time.

To help us in this kind of situation .NET already have Diagnostic Debugger Attributes. In this post we will check the usability of DebuggerBrowsableAttribute.

DebuggerBrowsable Attribute determines if and how a member is displayed in the debugger variable windows. You can add the DebuggerBrowsable attribute to properties, fields and indexers in classes and structures.The constructor for this attribute takes one of the DebuggerBrowsableState enumeration values, which specifies one of the following states:

• Never indicates that the member is not displayed in the data window. For example, using this value for the DebuggerBrowsableAttribute on a field removes the field from the hierarchy; the field is not displayed when you expand the enclosing type by clicking the plus sign (+) for the type instance.
• Collapsed indicates that the member is displayed but not expanded by default. This is the default behavior.
• RootHidden indicates that the member itself is not shown, but its constituent objects are displayed if it is an array or collection.

Let us understand more with a sample example,

The blow code block is used to understand different DebuggerBrowsableState of DebuggerBrowsableAttribute,

[code language=”csharp”]
static void Main(string[] args)
{
List employers = new List();
employers.Add(new Employee
{
Id = 1,
Name = new FullName("Dave", "A"),
Phone = new List() { "732-751-2921", "732-751-2923" },
UniqueNumber = System.Guid.NewGuid().ToString()
});
employers.Add(new Employee
{
Id = 2,
Name = new FullName("Aydin", "B"),
Phone = new List() { "732-752-2922", "732-752-2924" },
UniqueNumber = System.Guid.NewGuid().ToString()
});
employers.Add(new Employee
{
Id = 3,
Name = new FullName("John", "C"),
Phone = new List() { "732-753-2923", "732-752-2932" },
UniqueNumber = System.Guid.NewGuid().ToString()
});
employers.Add(new Employee
{
Id = 4,
Name = new FullName("Peter", "D"),
Phone = new List() { "732-754-2924", "732-752-3922" },
UniqueNumber = System.Guid.NewGuid().ToString()
});
}
[/code]

Now let me show you the class definition,

[code language=”csharp”]

class Employee
{
public int Id { get; set; }

[DebuggerBrowsable(DebuggerBrowsableState.RootHidden)]
public FullName Name { get; set; }

[DebuggerBrowsable(DebuggerBrowsableState.Collapsed)]
public List Phone { get; set; }

public string UniqueNumber { get; set; }

[DebuggerBrowsable(DebuggerBrowsableState.Never)]
public string Email { get; set; }

[DebuggerBrowsable(DebuggerBrowsableState.Never)]
public string Fax { get; set; }

[DebuggerBrowsable(DebuggerBrowsableState.Never)]
public int Age { get; set; }
}

public class FullName
{
public FullName(string firstName, string lastName)
{
FirstName = firstName;
LastName = lastName;
}
public string FirstName { get; set; }
public string LastName { get; set; }
}

[/code]

If you observe the above code you can see that I have decorated properties with DebuggerBrowsable attribute and desired DebuggerBrowsableState. In debug mode, you can check the Employees object to see the effect of this DebuggerBrowsableAttribute.

Below given screen shot shows the debug view of Employee object.
In the above screenshot we can see that Age, Email, Fax are not listed and FirstName, LastName are shown without root element. Below screenshot shows the Quick watch of employee object without the DebuggerBrowsableAttribute.