Historical Debugger and Test Impact Analysis in Visual Studio Team System 2010 (Channel 9)

Are you tired of constantly setting breakpoints to hone in on a pesky bug? How would you like to be able to step "back in time" through your debugger? The Historical Debugger in Visual Studio Team System 2010 promises to revolutionize your debugging experience. Habib Heydarian takes us through a demonstration of just a few of its capabilities.

But wait... there's more! Habib also shows us the new Test Impact Analysis feature his team is working on. With Test Impact Analysis it's possible to determine which of your tests will be... well... impacted by the code changes you're making! Not only does this mean that your unit test suite can run more quickly, but it can also lead to better testing and fewer bugs in software projects.

This "Humanized Screencast" is best viewed at fullscreen using the high-quality WMV download.

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bob53050

Oct 02, 2008 at 4:55 PM

Great demo. So when can we get the CTP bits????

Bob Hanson
briankel

Oct 02, 2008 at 10:43 PM

Hi Bob -

Brian Harry has said "soon" on his blog. Beyond that, of course, we're going to keep you guessing.
Jsoh :::Windows 8 Style UI :::

Oct 03, 2008 at 9:40 PM

You guys do such a great job on encoding content to silverlight, that I feel cheated when you don't.
BSalita

Oct 04, 2008 at 10:45 AM

Blind feedback: Before watching the video (dinner first), I want my 3rd party .Net language to be able to create historical snapshots (or whatever they're called). For example, traditionally, programmer errors would occur before and after file open statements or when spawning processes. Can my runtime tell the debugger to create a snapshot and name it? How will histroical debugging be exposed for 3rd party languages?
darrellp

Oct 05, 2008 at 3:26 AM

Okay, I hate to be dense, but this is the first time in my life I've seen a "humanized screencast" or heard of a "high quality WMV download". When I try running this regularly it constantly stops and reloads. So it's lovely to know that it's best to view it in this new way but it would be lovelier if I knew what I needed to do in order to view it with a "high quality WMV download" whatever that is. Sadly, while several of your videos on Ch9 suggest this, none of them offers anything in the way of instruction on exactly how to get such a thing. Can anybody please bother to provide me with that info? Thanks!
briankel

Oct 05, 2008 at 10:59 AM

Darrell - mouseover the "Downloads" tab, right-click the file in there (it's a .WMV) and save locally before viewing. This way you won't have to fight buffering problems. And yes, this is the first time you're seeing "humanized screencast" - we coined that term on Channel 9 to represent the format of these videos (PiP video + screencast) as opposed to our other videos which are either screencast or video camera.
KilKenny1

Oct 06, 2008 at 10:54 PM

Is the Historical Debugger going to depend on a Visual Studio installation or just the .NET Framework?
It would be great if it could be hooked up to a running production application so we don't have to capture dumps.
schroedl

Oct 07, 2008 at 7:23 PM

Good stuff. I get that the test impact feature will not be immediately available for Native C++ apps (We want it!). Will the historical debugger snapshots work with native C++ code? Please!!

John
Habib Heydarian

Oct 09, 2008 at 8:43 AM

We are working towards having a solution where you don't need VS installed to be able to collect a log file for the Historical Debugger. We haven't finalized a plan yet, so I can't go into detail about what the final experience will be.

Thanks,
HabibH.
Habib Heydarian

Oct 09, 2008 at 1:21 PM

John,

In VS 2010, the Historical Debugger feature will work for C++/CLI, but not for native C++. This was a really difficult decision for us but we are thinking hard about how to address this in the future.

Thanks,
HabibH.
Ganesh84

Dec 02, 2008 at 10:28 PM

Really neat demo. Is it possible to change values in historical debugging and re-run the same scenerio?
briankel

Dec 13, 2008 at 7:17 PM

No, this is analysis-only. You can't modify values. That's an interesting idea to consider for future releases, however.
Daveee

May 01, 2009 at 6:17 AM

Really cool feature...but yet again, us native C++ developpers get the shaft on this one...very sad to see
pluggy

May 06, 2009 at 2:02 PM

Will the Test Impact feature also work for third party test frameworks such as MBUnit?
sontek

Jun 22, 2009 at 9:57 PM

This seems to be only available for VSTS developers.... or am I just not seeing it? Is there a plan to push this out to all us poor development shops who aren't on VSTS? I'm dieing to use this feature!!
jrubis

Jul 27, 2009 at 9:25 AM

Microsoft needs to provide support for this feature in the Professional Version of Studio.
n8allan

Dec 12, 2009 at 8:27 PM

This is an idea whose time has come. I believe that this kind of things will replace logging. Logging clutters up code, slows down performance always (even if to see if it's turned on), and even when used copiously never seems to actually capture the state that's needed. Recorded debugging is the future! Mu ha ha ha

Now about VS 2010's feature. What I've seen so far seems to indicated that the user can't place their own "diagnostic events" (breakpoints) anywhere they need. Without this, the feature suffers from the same problem as logging... the capture points are arbitrary. I would like to set a bunch of breakpoints, each with a set of watches (expecially with expressions like I can normally), then be able to send this capture data to any location running my code (e.g. live running apps), capture the data, then send it back and walk through it in the IDE. It would be one of the biggest advances in programmer productivity in years!

Best,

--

Nathan Allan

Database Consulting Group
Seyran

Mar 08, 2010 at 8:04 PM

Looking forward for native C++ support!
weird.dreams

Jul 09, 2010 at 4:44 AM

Hi there,

we are only working with native code (C++).

When will these features (historical debugging, code analysis, impact tests) be available for C++ developers?

Thanks,

Andi