A debugger is a great tool for examining the internal state of an application, reproducing however a specific issue is a completely different matter. Fully replicating the production environment into a staging area might even be a feat on its own. Meet recording debuggers that remove all the guesswork and extra effort by monitoring the application in production and knowing exactly what happened.
Evan Phoenix discusses Rubinius, a modern Ruby VM loosely based on the Smalltalk-80 architecture. The goal is to build a fast, efficient VM with the latest research in dynamic language implementations
Debugger Canvas, the tool that introduced 'Code Bubbles' to the Visual Studio Ultimate debugger, debuted last summer. Debugger Canvas 1.1 launches with new features including an easy on/off switch that can be used while debugging, and the ability to view multiple threads at once.
Chronon Systems has recently released version 2 of their recording JVM debugger which allows for post execution logging.
Debuggers for Javascript are powerful - but only for plain Javascript. Minified Javascript and languages compiling to Javascript are not supported, ie. that means no breakpoints or accurate log messages for CoffeeScript, ClojureScript etc. InfoQ looks at the current situation and at the recently launched projects at WebKit and Mozilla that aim to fix it.
Debuggers in mobile web browsers are anemic at best. InfoQ takes a look at existing workarounds and tools like Weinre and JSConsole, as well as the upcoming changes in mobile browsers that will bring full debugging support. Also: the two mobile browsers that already live in the future and ship remote debugging support.
RedGate has announced that .NET Reflector is going to become a commercial product starting with version 7 which is to be made available in the first part of March, 2011, having a price tag of $35. Reflector Pro which allows developers to debug through disassembled code is currently offered for $95.
A whole batch of new Ruby VM releases is available. MacRuby 0.8 fixes bugs and begins the path to 1.0. Rubinius 1.2 improves memory efficiency and the debugger. MRI received new patch levels: 1.8.7-p330 and 1.9.2-p136, the first big bug fix update to 1.9.2.
John Blanco published a comparison between the iPhone and Android Development Environment. Even though he favors Java as a programming language, he believes that Xcode and the iPhone simulators are vastly superior to the tools provided by Google. Do you agree?
