Enter the MoloScope

Mole 2010 and Mole 2012 are Visual Studio debugger visualizers that enable you to drill into and analyze any program (except Silverlight, Metro and Windows Phone) which targets the .NET Framework 3.5 or above.  It runs in Visual Studio while you are debugging. The feature in Mole that allows you to view and edit any object in your program is called the MoloScope. The MoloScope does many thing that can help simplify your debugging tasks.




Inspect Any Object – Immediately view properties and fields of any .NET object.

Navigate Object Graphs – Click on a property or field’s value to drill into that sub-object, and view its properties/fields. You can drill as far into any object graph as you need.

Follow the Breadcrumb Trail – Navigate back to previously visited objects by clicking on items in the breadcrumb trail. Every time you drill into an object it is added to the breadcrumb trail. Mouse over an item in the trail to see the data type of that object.



Multi-Column Sorting – Sort the MoloScope to quickly find the data you need. You can sort by multiple columns at the same time, by holding the Ctrl key while clicking on column headers. Your sort settings are applied every time Mole opens.

Favorites – Mark a property or field as a ‘favorite’ so that it is easy to find every time you run Mole. You can sort the Fav column to bring all favorites to the top of the MoloScope, or just click on the Favorites tab to view them all at once.

Row Filtering – Filter the rows by typing into text fields in the column headers. Multiple filters can be applied at the same time. The rows in the MoloScope that don’t match your filter text are removed as you type. This makes it easy to quickly find what you’re looking for.



Object Snapshots – Save a snapshot of an object’s properties to disk and compare it to another object or the same object at a later point in time. This makes it easy to detect differences between objects and track changes to an object over time. Properties with values different from the loaded snapshot are highlighted in red. Sort by the Value column to bring the properties with different values to the top. You can access this functionality via the MoloScope menu item, in the Window’s main menu.



Editing – Modify the value of any property or field whose value can be changed. The new value is assigned to the real live object in your application.



Property Metadata – View information about each property or field; such as its name, value, and data type. When Moling a WPF application, the MoloScope displays additional information related to dependency properties.

Drill Into Bindings – If a property is bound you can click on the icon in the Binding column to drill into the applied data binding (for WPF and Windows Forms applications only).



View Collections of Data – If you need to look at objects in a collection, just open the Collection Viewer window to see all of the objects at once. It even supports collections with different types of objects in it.





Export to Excel – Export a collection of data to a CSV file and then you can view it in Excel.

Adjust Column Layout – You can easily reorder and resize the MoloScope columns to suit your preferences. Your preferred column arrangement is applied every time Mole opens.

Copy to Clipboard – Copy a property or field’s value to the clipboard via the context menu.



Get Assistance – Search the Web for documentation about any property in the MoloScope. Help is just a right-click away.