Why is the dictionary debug visualizer less useful in Visual Studio 2010 for Silverlight debugging?

Question

I was debugging in Visual Studio 2010, which we just installed and trying to look at a dictionary in the quick watch window. I see Keys and Values, but drilling into those s

Answer 1

There is a workaround to dump the contents of the dictionary in the debugger.

1. To your project, add a reference to the linq dll (e.g. System.Core)

2. Add the following statement to your source file:

   using System.Linq;

3. In the watch window, type:

   test.Take(1)

4. Then expand the "Results View" group row. This should give you the familiar list of key, value pairs.

[This workaround was reported by rickpastoor on connect.microsoft.com for Bug 557741]

Answer 2

The debugger visualizer for Dictionary is the exact same class with the exact same behavior. It is still the private Mscorlib_DictionaryDebugView class. Unexpanded it shows Count, expanded it shows an array of the elements.

Your code snippet suggests that you are using a completely different Dictionary class, one that is not generic.