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Posted by Jonathan Allen on Apr 22, 2009
Have you ever wanted to know what you program was doing 5 minutes ago? Ever wondered exactly what files it was opening instead of the one you wanted it to? Well Visual Studio 2010 has got you covered.
During the Lang.NET keynote (10 minute mark), Microsoft demonstrated Visual Studio 2010’s diagnostic events and historical debugging features. These features allow developers to not only see the application as it currently stands, but also the events that led up to that condition.
The diagnostic events window shows key events in an application’s run. These include exceptions, file access, and debugger events. In some ways these could have been hand-rolled using Debug.Write statements or macros on breakpoints. But with an integrated list view, this allows you to filter on the type of event or the thread the event occurred on.
While a good feature on its own, this is dwarfed by the historical debugging capabilities. When turned on, Visual Studio can capture stack frames and the variables associated with them. This allows developers to back-step through the program to find out why something happened the way it did.
In order to save this information, the state of the application is stored on disk. By default it only stores key types, but developers can set it to record literally every parameter, object, and global variable. The only thing it will not store is local variables.
For more information, also see the video discussing historical debugging on Channel 9. This feature should be included in the upcoming beta 1 release.
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I can't believe I didn't hear about this yet. This is going to be a very useful feature for all developers of any level.
objection
as far as i can see this useful feature will be useful indeed only for rather simple products
and now imagine how this debugger will slow some massive semi-enterprise web-solution considering that simple debugger slows them quite noticeably
don't believe that MS will make this feature as lightweight and fast as possible for such solutions (and, you know, these are solutions that _really_ need this feature) as, for instance, log4net/log4j components or something like that
I think this is going to be great.
Maybe I'm wrong but it seems to me an "anti-TDD" feature, the classic "nice" feature just to catch the attention of lazy developers.
Two points.
First, this is an op-in feature. Most of the time you will have it tuned down or turned off completely.
Secondly, it is in no way meant to replace traditional logging. It is a debugging and analysis tool, not something that should be run in production.
Maybe I'm wrong but it seems to me an "anti-TDD" feature, the classic "nice" feature just to catch the attention of lazy developers.
It is important to keep in mind that debugging and testing are not the same thing. Tests are for testing, that is determining if something is broken. Debugging tools help you find out why something isn't working. As a software engineer, you need to understand how to use both.
Yes, debug and TDD are two different things but I'dont' agree when youn say taht tests are only for "determining if something is broken". If a test fails it means that your code doesn't respect the expected behavior, and if you apply good TDD you know exactly where you code fails without walking through code (that is a boring and repetitive task)
From en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test-driven_development
"Benefits :
...
Programmers using pure TDD on new ('greenfield') projects report they only rarely feel the need to invoke a debugger."
Many teams don't subscribe to TDD. Besides, as has already been stated, tests and debugging are really orthogonal.
Many teams don't subscribe to TDD.
That's a pity :-) ...
Maybe I'm wrong but it seems to me an "anti-TDD" feature, the classic "nice" feature just to catch the attention of lazy developers.
Unit tests and debugging are not same. But IMHO, people tends to make less unit tests and to do more edit-run-watch cycle, when they have good debugging tools.
Reading this post reminds me of its java counterpart, Omniscient Debugger (www.lambdacs.com/debugger/). It is a java historical debugger that shows stacks, threads, local variables, method trace, code and even output at the same time, which at this moment, seems to be a superset of the .net historical debugger.
Yes, the java Omniscient Debugger (ODB) might be better, but unlike vs.net historical debugging, ODB seems to be a dead project: That page is from 18 February 2007. Why this feature is not included by default in Eclipse or Netbeans? (or even IntelliJ) ?
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