Wednesday, March 14, 2012

View the Contents of a DataTable or DataView While Debugging

I always forget this because I use four different programming languages(3 different IDEs), so I'll put it up here in case I forget ...... again!  Also, credit to Rob Prouse (on StackOverflow).


The Visual Studio debugger comes with four standard visualizers. These are the text, HTML, and XML visualizers, all of which work on string objects, and the dataset visualizer, which works for DataSet, DataView, and DataTable objects.
To use it, break into your code, mouse over your DataSet, expand the quick watch, view the Tables, expand that, then view Table[0] (for example). You will see something like {Table1} in the quick watch, but notice that there is also a magnifying glass icon. Click on that icon and your DataTable will open up in a grid view.