View content of a Stream in Visual Studio's QuickWatch window

Question

How do I view the content of a Stream in the QuickWatch window within Visual Studio?

Update

As per Daniel's answer I used the following code -

System.Text.Encoding.UTF8.GetString((byte[])stream.GetType().GetMethod("InternalGetBuffer", System.Reflection.BindingFlags.Instance | System.Reflection.BindingFlags.NonPublic).Invoke(stream, null))

Answer 1

You can view the content of the MemoryStream without altering it when you can make some assumptions:

1. Your stream indeed is a MemoryStream
2. Your stream contains only string data
3. You know the encoding of that string, e.g. UTF8 or ASCII

If you can make these assumptions, you can use the following code in your Watch window:

System.Text.Encoding.UTF8.GetString((byte[])stream.GetType().GetMethod("InternalGetBuffer", System.Reflection.BindingFlags.Instance | System.Reflection.BindingFlags.NonPublic).Invoke(stream, null))

Disclaimer:
This might have side effects I haven't thought of or might throw an exception in certain circumstances, so don't use this in production code.

Answer 2

I don't believe there's anything generic built in, since QuickWatch is not generally designed to affect the state of what's being watched, and reading from a stream inherently alters the internal state (e.g. the current position) - even assuming that the stream can be read.

And even then, not all streams support seeking, so reading from the stream would then make the read data unavailable for the actual program, with no means to recover that data.

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In limited circumstances, if you construct the MemoryStream from a byte buffer, or if GetBuffer() is applicable, a watch on the byte buffer would be doable, rather than trying to watch the stream.