Introduction
Mole was authored by Karl Shifflett, Josh Smith and Andrew Smith who make up Team Mole. The core development process took the team several weeks. Most of the additional enhancements were implemented by Andrew and Karl, with a lot of testing and feedback provided by Josh. You can visit Team Mole's Home Page here. This article was written by Karl.
Mole has been tested on WPF, WCF, WF, WinForms and
ASP.NET projects on Vista, XP Pro, x32, x64, VS2005 and VS2008, C# and
VB.NET. We sincerely hope all .NET developers like and use Mole. Currently Mole does not support Silverlight but we will consider writing a visualizer, or similar tool, shortly after Silverlight 2.0 is released to the public.
This article makes no assumptions about your prior exposure to the Mole project, or visualizers in general.
What is Mole?
Mole is a Visual Studio visualizer. Visualizers have been part of Visual Studio since version 2005. During debugging sessions, visualizers allow developers to view objects and data using a customized interface. Visual Studio ships with several simple but useful visualizers. Many developers have posted visualizers for .NET classes.
Mole was designed to not only allow the developer to view objects or data, but to also allow the developer to drill into properties of those objects and then edit them. Mole allows unlimited drilling into objects and sub-objects. When Mole finds an IEnumerable object, the data can be viewed in a DataGridView or in the properties grid. Mole easily handles collections that contain multiple types of data. Mole also allows the developer to view non-public fields of all these same objects. You can learn a lot about the .NET Framework by drilling around your application's data.
Depending on the type of object you are visualizing you can view properties, fields, IEnumerable collection data, an image of the data/control, and run-time XAML.
Mole v4 allows editing of properties. Please see the Editing section below for full details.
Quick History
When a great friend and co-author Josh Smith wrote Woodstock for WPF on 13 Nov 2007, I got pretty excited about how Visual Studio visualizers that target WPF can really assist developers. I started making a list of features I wanted and began working on Mole.
Mole was my first visualizer and first real WinForms program I've created with .NET 2.0. I spend most of my time with WPF, WCF,
ASP.NET, SQL Server and Windows Services. So starting from scratch would prove to be challenging at times.
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Codeproject Posted via email from Jasper-net
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