Debugging by Using the Store Viewer
Note
This article applies to Visual Studio 2015. If you're looking for the latest Visual Studio documentation, see Visual Studio documentation. We recommend upgrading to the latest version of Visual Studio. Download it here
With the Store Viewer, you can examine the state of a store used by Domain-Specific Language Tools. The Store Viewer displays all of the domain model elements that are in a specific store, along with element properties and links between elements.
Opening Store Viewer
When you are in the Visual Studio experimental build, stop your code at a breakpoint where an instance of the store contains model information. Then, open the Store Viewer by typing the following command in the Immediate window:
Microsoft.VisualStudio.Modeling.Diagnostics.StoreViewer.Show(mystore);
Note
You must replace mystore with the name of your store instance. Also, if you add the namespace to your code, you can type the command for displaying Store Viewer without the fully qualified namespace:
using Microsoft.VisualStudio.Modeling.Diagnostics;
…
StoreViewer.Show(mystore);
The Show method has several overloads. You can specify an instance of a store or a partition as the parameter.
As an alternative, you can put the line of code that displays the Store Viewer anywhere in your code where the parameter that you pass to the Show method is in scope. This action displays the Store Viewer when the line of code executes as a snapshot of the contents of the store.
Using Store Viewer
When the Store Viewer opens, a modeless Windows Forms window appears, as the following illustration shows.
Store Viewer
The Store Viewer has three panes: the left pane, top-right pane, and bottom-right pane. The left pane is a tree view of the types in the DomainDataDirectory member of a store. If you expand the Partition node and click an element, the element's properties appear in the top-right pane. If the element is linked to other elements, the additional elements appear in the bottom-right pane. If you double-click an element in the bottom-right pane, the element is highlighted in the left pane.