Enable better default formatters for text types in debug variables

[timheuer]

VS Code debugger experience lacks a common tooling experience in visualizing language-agnostic and common formats when debugging and providing a delightful experience for strings.

Take into account a string variable that is JSON (serialized to string), the default experience in VSCode is a blob of string text or default "view as HEX" both of which are not as helpful.

Considering Visual Studio's text implementation (for all languages, default in the shell), it enables visualization of very common formats of JSON, XML, JWT tokens, etc.:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/debugger/string-visualizer-dialog-box?view=vs-2022#text-string-data

Adding string to JSON/XML/JWT would be a value-add for the default debugger experience in variables, while still delegating custom language-specific visualizers to the languages themselves (e.g., IEnumerable for C#, etc.)

[roblourens]

I think this could fall under #197287 @connor4312?

[connor4312]

Yes, that's exactly that issue I think

[vs-code-engineering]

Thanks for creating this issue! We figured it's covering the same as another one we already have. Thus, we closed this one as a duplicate. You can search for similar existing issues. See also our issue reporting guidelines.

Happy Coding!