Visual Studio C# watch variable representation

Question

I have a class that might have many fields, but in order to identify it in the debugger I am only interested in its Name property. Is there a way to display its name in the watches while debugging in Visual Studio other than modifying Autoexp.dat?

Is Visual Studio maybe looking for certain fields/functions to derive a string representation similar to how Eclipse does it in Java (it uses the result of the toString() method as representation in the debugger)?

Answer 1

Good way to do that is to use DebuggerDisplay attribute:

[DebuggerDisplay("Name = {Name}")]
class Data {
    public string Name { get; set; }
}

Now your watch will display Name = valueOfName for instance of given class. It's in general better than overriding ToString (which also works), because overriding ToString affects more than just debugging display, and you might not want to do that just for debugging purposes.

Answer 2

.NET uses the result of ToString to display the variable value when it is an object . So simply overriding ToString would do:

public override string ToString() => this.Name;

If you have no control over the class, putting a watch on the Name property will do too of course. (Use theInstance?.Name to be safe for null references)