CAB/SCSF Visualizer

So I have an announcement to make: if you are a programmer working in 2008 and you don't know the basics of SCSF and the Visualizer, and I catch you, I'm going to punish you by making you peel onions for 6 months in a submarine. I swear I will.

The SCSF/CAB visualizer allows you to see interesting facts about your Workitems. I used it recently to debug and solve a problem in an application that I will be talking about in a next post. The visualizer allows you to see what your currently loaded work items are and shows the hierarchy that the object builder have built for you.

you can still see the same thing using the usual debugger as per the screen shot below, however the visualizer will make it easier for you since you do not need to stop and look for your root workitem to examine its contents. the visualizer will grasp the root workitem for you and will monitor it at all times. 

The screen shot below shows what the Visualizer screen looks like.

The visualizer shows you the root Workitem and its known collections (Items, UIextensionSites, etc..). using the WorkItems collections within the root workitem you will be able to examine what views are loaded and the relationships between your Views and workitems. 

one interesting thing I notices working with the visualizer is that you can double click a view and the Visualizer will show it to you in the WorkItem Visualization window. even more, it will allow you to interact with it.

To use the visualizer you need to download CAB Visualization Tool which is a dll from here

http://www.codeplex.com/WorkItemVisualizer/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=15117#ReleaseFiles

Copy this dll into your output folder (or add it as a reference in your Shell application) and then  change your app.config (shell.exe.config) by adding the following lines appropriately within the noted sections.

all you need to do after that is to start your application, magically the visualizer will appear and will show you the details of your CAB/SCSF application. neat eh?