Making the right use of Visual Studio’s Object Browser

Many of you might be familiar with the Object Browser that Visual Studio provides. Well, I decided to explore what benefits if any it has to offer to its user. And guess what my exploration revealed some interesting results. In simple words, Object Browser gives you a view of all the objects that are accessible within your application.

There exists more than one way to open the Object Browser. You can open the Object Browser from the View Menu, or open the Object Browser by clicking on its button in the Main toolbar. Also you could use a shortcut key (Ctrl+W,J) to open the Object Browser.

As a developer, you might be faced with situations in which you have to use and explore new classes and APIs. Well you guessed it, Object Browser will make your exploring task easier. Object Browser shows the various properties, methods, events associated to a certain class within a certain namespace. In addition to that it also shows the relationship (inheritance) between classes.

The Object Browser comprises of three panes which are:

• Object pane on the left side.
• Members pane on the upper right side.
• Description pane on the lower right side.

Let us consider a scenario in which we intend to explore the System.Net.Mail namespace.

First of all, Open the Object Browser, your screen should look something like this:

Then expand the System node and select the System.Net.Mail namespace and expand it as shown below:

After this, select the MailMessage class, you will be presented with the following picture

The Member pane on upper-right side displays the class members (methods, properties etc) of MailMessage, whereas the Description pane on lower-right side provides a brief description of the MailMessage class.

Let us explore it a little bit more, select a method lets say MailMessage(string, string) and observe the change in the description pane. Your description should look something like this

The description pane provides the summary, description and exceptions that may occur for the selected method.

In my opinion, the Object Browser is a time-saving tool that assists you in exploring a certain namespace and classes within that namespace, thus assisting you in searching the required class for a certain scenario.

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