Attribute that displays property value in Visual Studio

Question

I believe I saw somewhere an attribute that, when applied to a class, would show the value of a property in intellisense. I'm not talking about XML comments. It looked something like this:

[SomeAttribute("Name = '{0}', Age = '{1}'", Name, Age)]
MyClass

Anyone know which Attribute I'm talking about?

Answer 1

It doesn’t make sense to “show a value in IntelliSense”, but I guess you mean in the debugger. In that case, the attribute you’re looking for is DebuggerDisplayAttribute:

[DebuggerDisplay("Name = '{Name}', Age = '{Age}'")]
public class XYZ
{
    public string Name;
    public int Age;
}

Of course, you can also override the ToString() method instead. In the absense of a DebuggerDisplayAttribute, the debugger uses ToString(). You should use DebuggerDisplayAttribute only if you really need the implementation of ToString() to be different (and insufficient for debugging).