I had no idea I could do this and can hardly wait to try it. [edit: The author says it works for C#, F#, VB.NET, etc) in VisualStudio] The related article goe

I had no idea I could do this and can hardly wait to try it. [edit: The author says it works for C#, F#, VB.NET, etc) in VisualStudio] The related article goes into more depth including a list of DOs and DON'Ts: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jaredpar/archive/2011/03/18/debuggerdisplay-attribute-best-practices.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jaredpar/archive/2011/03/18/debugger... (Quoting the above link) Preferred Pattern My personal preferred pattern for DebuggerDisplay attributes is to have the entire item be an expression: DebuggerDisplay. I then add a private instance property to my type named DebuggerDisplay and do all of my custom formatting in this property. Having the property be private is fine because nothing is private in the debugger. [DebuggerDisplay("{DebuggerDisplay,nq}")] public sealed class Student { public string FirstName { get; set; } public string LastName { get; set; } private string DebuggerDisplay { get { return string.Format("Student: {0} {1}", FirstName, LastName); } } } The ,nq suffix here just asks the expression evaluator to remove the quotes when displaying the final value (nq = no quotes). I prefer this pattern because it’s only requires a single function to be evaluated, I can still have language specific expressions (which are nicely type checked by the compiler) and it doesn’t contribute to the public API of my type.