Is there a way to dump a stream from the debugger in VS

I'm using VS 2010 and am working with a lot of streams in C# in my current project. I've written some stream dump utilities for writing out certain types of streams for debugging purposes, but I seem to keep stumbling across times when I am debugging and need to look into the stream I am debugging over, but I didn't put my dump calls in there. It seems like I should be able to dump the stream somehow just using VS or maybe tell it to call one of my dump methods on a stream in th开发者_Python百科e debugger. Is there a wy to do this?

The streams I am working with have some text describing a blob of data and then the bytes of the blob, so looking at the description is useful. My dump methods typically just dump that information out and then skip the blobs.

Type this into the Immediate Window:

System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine((new System.IO.StreamReader(stream)).ReadToEnd());

Maybe you could write a Visualizer? MSDN explains how here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/e2zc529c.aspx

You could just use the immediate window to call your dump function while debugging:

MikeDsDumpFxn(whateverStreamIsActiveInThisContext)

If your function returns a string it will print right there as the result in the immediate window.

If you have binary data in the stream you can try dumping it into a file using the following lines in the immediate window:

var lastPos = stream.Position;
stream.Seek(0, SeekOrigin.Begin)
File.WriteAllBytes("filepath.bin", new BinaryReader(stream).ReadBytes((int)stream.Length))
stream.Seek(lastPos, SeekOrigin.Begin)

The stream obviously has to be seekable to prevent the side effects of changing the position of the stream when dumping it (reverted in the last line).

If the stream doesn't have the Length property you can use a similar solution to the one done here:

var lastPos = stream.Position;    
var ms = new MemoryStream();
stream.Seek(0, SeekOrigin.Begin)
stream.CopyTo(ms)
File.WriteAllBytes("filepath.bin", ms.ToArray())
stream.Seek(lastPos, SeekOrigin.Begin)