Remember back in the day 2007 when Visual Studio debug visualizers were new and hot?
Remember how WPF/XAML debugging wasn't all that it could be (cough)?
Remember how Josh Smith and Karl Shifflett stepped up and released Mole? Remember how Mole went commercial and then a few years later closed?
Well then you'll want to remember May 2016, because that's when a new and improved Mole was released for Visual Studio 2015, free of charge!
Mole Visual Studio Debugger Visualizer
Introduction
Mole is a debugger visualizer that runs in Visual Studio while you are debugging .NET applications. Mole makes debugging easier because it provides a comprehensive view into all of your application’s visual and data objects.
Mole enables developers to view, edit, search, compare, and drill into object properties and fields.
Mole is only supported on the Professional and Enterprise versions of Visual Studio 2015.
I strongly encourage you to view the below training videos, especially “How to Open Mole”. If you have never used a Visualizer before or don’t know how Visual Studio launches them, you’ll be frustrated. Please watch the videos and have a happy debugging experience with Mole.
Even the early releases (2007-2008) of Mole had debugger visualizer features that were ground breaking and ahead of their time.
Enjoy Mole and happy debugging.
Features
- Element Tree that displays a hierarchical view of your WPF and Windows Forms application UI
- Displays an image of the selected object in the Element Tree
- The MoloScope Provides:
- Searchable listing of all properties for the current object
- Ability to edit the properties
- Ability to drill into a property and then inspect that object
- Ability to drill into a WPF data binding
- Ability to pin commonly used properties to the top of the listing for quick access
- Ability to view and export data collections
- Ability to compare property values in memory with property values previously saved to disk
- Much more...
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ASP.NET Developers Please Read This
When using Mole with ASP.NET projects that utilize IIS as the web server, as opposed to the Visual Studio’s built in web server, you MUST give the account that the web site is running under, Read and Read & Execute permissions to the \Visualizers directory.
If you do not do this, you will get an exception when attempting to load the visualizer in a debugging session. You would get this exception for any visualizer and not just Mole. This is because the ASPNET account has very few permissions on your computer. Adding these permissions prevents this exception.
Training Videos
Please watch these four short videos to get the most from Mole.
[Click through to Karl's site for these]
Download
https://github.com/Oceanware/Mole2015
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