XML Debug Type Visualizer
I've create a XML debugger visualizer for Visual Studio 2005 which you can download here. Just unzip and place the DLL in 'C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\Packages\Debugger\Visualizers'. You can view the XML as text and as a DOM like tree as well as run XPath expressions as a filter mechanism.
Couple of points worth noting....
1) The visualizer borrows heavily from an application I wrote a couple of years ago. Performance on large XML files might not be very good and I haven't really reviewed the code. I've went very much with the it works so why break it approach.
2) You can only develop Type Visualizer for types that are serializable. Nothing I have read on visualizer has stated this explicitly so you've heard it here first. Unfortunately the XmlDocument type is not serializable, it doesn't have a Serializable attribute. So this visualizer works only on strings, the idea being you use it to view the InnerText property of an XmlDocument or other well formed XML based string.
Update: I've been told point 2 is incorrect. I'll will update once I have more information.
3) XPath expressions uses a prefix of 'default' for default namespaces. So use /default:root/default:child to run an XPath expression. The application hasn't been ran on fairly complex XML but I've never had any problems with it so far.
4) You can modify the XML in the visualizer but it won't update the application.
I'll work on it if and when time and projects permit. It's really something I've developed for myself rather that thinking of other people.
