Visual Studio Add-Ins Every Developer Should Downl

While a lot of users will write visualizers for their own custom complex types, some developers are already posting visualizers for parts of the Framework. I am going to look at one of the community-built visualizers that is already available and how it can be used to make debugging much easier.

The ASP.NET Cache represents a collection of objects that are being stored for later use. Each object has some settings wrapped around it, such as how long it will be cached for or any cache dependencies. There is no easy way while debugging to get an idea of what is in the cache, how long it will be there, or what it is watching. Brett Johnson saw that gap and wrote Cache Visualizer to examine the ASP.NET cache.

Once you have downloaded and installed the visualizer you will see a new icon appear next to the cache object in your debug windows, as shown in Figure 13 Ҷƪл˵?