One of my biggest complaints about using CSLA has been the issue of Visual Studio’s failure to work correctly in the watch window with CSLA objects. 

I wrote a post a while back about my issues:

So for example I have a simple list called “projects” which is of type ProjectList containing ProjectListItems.

If I put “projects” in the watch window, for Value I get:

“Count = {System.TypeLoadException}”

If I put “projects(0)” in the watch window, I get:

{“The generic type ‘System.Collections.ObjectModel.Collection`1’ was used with the wrong number of generic arguments in assembly ‘mscorlib, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089’.” : “System.Collections.ObjectModel.Collection`1”}

Rocky’s response was:

This is a known issue. I’ve actually talked to the VS debugger team about this, and they didn’t have a satisfactory answer – and certainly not a solution. This issue has existed since 2005 when generics were introduced into .NET.

Well, after doing some digging I think I have come across a few work arounds.

If I were to use the Watch Window and put:

projects.Count

it would throw an error.  But if I put:

projects.Count.ToString

then I get the correct result.

Also when picking a specific item:

projects.Item(2)

I get the same exception.  However, if I use:

CType(projects.Item(2),Object)

I get the object as expected!

I hope this helps out others as this is really important when debugging an application.