Jaa

What Would Make Debugging Cool?

  • Artikkeli

The Visual Studio Debugger is probably one of the most used dev tools in the world, but what could make it cool and exciting again?

Visual Studio is the #1 dev tool, and regardless of language, they all use the same debugger.  When you hit F5 to run your app, it runs under the debugger.  But who thinks "oh! I wish the debugger could do ____"?  Do you??

What are your thoughts?  What new feature would get you excited about debugging again?  How could VS help you find bugs in your apps faster?  What kinds of programming paradigms are you facing that are tricky to debug?  Multi-threaded apps?  etc

Help change the world of software development!   Who knows?  Hopefully we can improve the VS Debugger if we know more of why types of apps your trying to write that are tough to debug today.

P.S.  I'm not talking to the TDD crowd out there that would argue we should put the debugger out of business, but I'm asking for real constructive feedback, a wish list, for more effective debugging.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    December 22, 2006
    I so would like some good javascript debugging, better yet, great javascript debugging would be even better.  I'd also like to be able to skip over client side errors.

  • Anonymous
    December 22, 2006
    It wouldn't make me "excited", but it will make my life easier:

  1. True Edit & Continue experience (including annon'ymous delegates, etc.)
  2. Better perfomance on large projects
  3. Improved Immidiate window, I.e. with the ability to type multiple lines of code, set berakpoints within it, etc. In other words, I want this waindow to act as it was part of my source file, whithout actually modifying the source file.

  • Anonymous
    December 22, 2006
    It would be great to see what is running inside different threads that were created be a program.

  • Anonymous
    December 22, 2006
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    December 22, 2006
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    December 23, 2006
    I debugger that could keep the history a variable's values and where each change was made would be the best enhancment!

  • Anonymous
    December 24, 2006
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    December 28, 2006
    Wow, there is a lot of great feedback here.  Thanks everyone.  It looks like some of the common issues are debugging multithreaded apps, the need to "step back" in time, improved script debugging, large project performance, and more.  We're planning our next version now and will take all these into consideration.

  • Anonymous
    April 30, 2007
    2 words: Disconnected Debugging where you can log the changes/events made in the program while running. then you can later on load the log in the debugger and replay what happend. benefits:

  • make a stepback in time feature possible
  • make it possible to just run the code for a while and catch those "unable to reproduce" errors by just recording them while they happend