Hex String Visualizer Version 1

Download Hex String Visualizer Version 1 for Windows 7/Vista/XP SP2+ (8 kB)

Download Hex String Visualizer For Visual Studio 2005

The text visualizer in Visual Studio 2005 isn’t very good. When you’re looking at a string in the debugger, you won’t see what you’re looking for if there are any null characters in the string. As far as I can tell this is a holdover from the "bad old days" when null-terminated C strings were the norm.

This is a pain in the butt if you are dealing with binary data stored in a System.String. I regularly work with data that needs to be viewed in hexadecimal format. That's why I created the hex string visualizer, thanks to THIS POST by 4 Guys From Rolla, which is a mighty fine tutorial on creating visualizer plugins.

Here’s what the not-so-informative text visualizer looks like:

Here’s what the hex string visualizer looks like:

I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure out which one gives better debugging info.

Keep in mind that the NULL characters have been replaced with spaces in the top of the window (worth noting if you're going to copy and paste the string somewhere else).

The download is a .DLL file. Just drop it in the appropriate directory and it’ll be available in the list of string visualizers next time you run Visual Studio.

For VS2005 on WinXP: <user>\My Documents\Visual Studio 2005\Visualizers

For VS2008 on Vista: <user>\Documents\Visual Studio 2008\Visualizers

Hex String Visualizer has had more than 800 downloads.