Another small yet useful thing. Usually when we have an object of a class and want it to be more debugger friendly, we override the ToString method. From that method, we return something meaningful, like the name of a client.
It comes out, that there is a far better way to do it, than to override the ToString method. Introduced in .NET 2.0, there is a DebuggerDisplayAttribute class. It's an attribute, so we apply it as any other class-level attribute by decorating our class. What is more interesting is the fact, that we can apply it to a field or property!
Inside the attribute definition, we have a way to format the final string a bit. We can put variables that will be replaced by a field or property value or even by a method call! Now that's interesting.
Given the following code:
[DebuggerDisplay("Name: {name}")]
class Client
{
public Client(string name)
{
this.name = name;
}
private string name;
public string Name
{
get { return name; }
set { name = value; }
}
[DebuggerDisplay("HashCode: {GetHashCode()}")]
public string HashCode
{
get { return GetHashCode().ToString(); }
}
}
We get something like this inside debugger:
Told you. A nice little feature!