I'm trying to investigate a bug in a crash dump (so I can not change the code). I have a really complicated object (thousands of lines in the serialized representation) and its state is inconsistent. To investigate its state the Visual Studio debugger view is useless. But the object has a data contract. I'd like to serialize it and then use my favorite text editor to navigate across the object. Is it possible to do the from the debugger?
Some time ago I wrote this one-liner serializing an object to a file on the disk. Copy/paste it to your Immediate window, and replace obj (it's referenced twice) with your object. It'll save a text.xml file to c:\temp, change it to your liking.
(new System.Xml.Serialization.XmlSerializer(obj.GetType())).Serialize(new System.IO.StreamWriter(@"c:\temp\text.xml"), obj)
Don't expect any magic though, if the object cannot be serialized, it'll throw an exception.