Terms of use?

By using this project or its source code, for any purpose and in any shape or form, you grant your implicit agreement to all the following statements:

You condemn Russia and its military aggression against Ukraine
You recognize that Russia is an occupant that unlawfully invaded a sovereign state
You support Ukraine's territorial integrity, including its claims over temporarily occupied territories of Crimea and Donbas
You reject false narratives perpetuated by Russian state propaganda

To learn more about the war and how you can help, click here. Glory to Ukraine! 🇺🇦

Object Dumper

Reflection-based extension for Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, and JetBrains Rider for exporting in-memory objects during debugging to C# Object Initialization Code, JSON, Visual Basic Object Initialization Code, XML, and YAML string.

Inspired by ObjectExporter.

The closest alternative was proprietary OzCode export functionality (link is dead, company was bought by DataDog, plugin does not exist anymore).

"Dump as" commands are available via context menu in the Code and Immediate windows (Visual Studio), or in the Debug tool window (Rider).

The result will be printed to a new document window, Output Window -> Object Dumper Pane, or copied to the clipboard, depending on the DumpTo option.

Presentation

IDE Support

| IDE | Documentation | |-----|---------------| | Visual Studio | Built-in (this page) | | Visual Studio Code | VS Code README | | JetBrains Rider | Rider README |

Configurable:

Quick tips:

How to compare two dumped objects:
1. Enable option "Show Miscellaneous files in Solution Explorer":
2. If you use Visual Studio 17.7 or above - just skip this step (it's an embedded), otherwise install a diff extension - I verified the Heku.VsDiff
3. Select files in Solution Explorer under the Miscellaneous Files folder -> Right click -> Compare Selected(Files):

Known restrictions:

C#, F# and VisualBasic project languages are currently supported only.
netstandard 2.0+, netcore2.0+, netframework 4.5+
if you are debugging the solution in Release mode or debuging DLLs from another source, such as a nuget package, you'll get an error message: "Cannot evaluate expression because the code of the current method is optimized" or "error CS0103: The name 'YellowFlavor' does not exist in the current context". Solution: switch to Debug mode or turn the Tools > Options > Debugging > General > Suppress JIT optimization on module load option on.
local debugging only.
if you see any encoding-related issues, please select the option: Tools > Options > Environment > Documents > Save documents as Unicode when data cannot be saved in codepage.
it doesn't work for UWP applications, because UAP doesn't support Assembly.LoadFrom. You can bypass this restriction by referencing the .nestandard20 version of Serialization lib and calling: YellowFlavor.Serialization.ObjectSerializer.WarmUp(); for loading the serializer into executing assembly. Example
for debugging the IIS-hosted ASP.NET MVC backend, please add the following access for YourComputerName\IIS_IUSRS group: Read-Write access to %userprofile%\AppData\Local\Temp directory and Read access to %userprofile%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\VisualStudio directory, otherwise, it will throw UnauthorizedAccessException.

Privacy Notice: No personal data is collected at all.

Powered By

| Repository | Purpose | License | | ------------- | ------------- | ------------- | | ILRepack | Bundles the serializer dependencies into a single merged assembly, minimizing the risk of dependency/version conflicts in the consumer’s application | | | Json.NET | Serializes objects to JSON (and XML via Json.NET XML helpers) output | | | VarDump | Serializes objects to C# and VB output | | | YamlDotNet | Serializes objects to YAML output | |

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A big thank you to Yova Solutions for sponsoring my work!

ObjectDumper

Install / Use

README