Visual Studio Toolbox: Debugger Canvas (Channel 9)

Visual Studio Toolbox: Debugger Canvas

Posted: May 23, 2012 at 8:15 AM

By: Robert Green

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7 Comments

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In this episode, Kael Rowan of Microsoft Research joins us and shows the Debugger Canvas. Debugger Canvas is a power tool for Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate that pulls together the code you're exploring onto a single pan-and-zoom display. As you hit breakpoints or step into code, Debugger Canvas shows the methods that you're debugging, including call lines and local variables, to help you see the bigger picture as well as the details.

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kaelr http://blogs.msdn.com/kaelr

May 23, 2012 at 9:33 AM

Hi everyone, thanks for watching. Here are some more links for Debugger Canvas:
Download Debugger Canvas and watch more in-depth videos on DevLabs:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/devlabs/debuggercanvas.aspx
Debugger Canvas Forum for questions and discussions:
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/debuggercanvas/threads
Keep an eye on my blog for future updates about Debugger Canvas and Code Canvas:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/kaelr/
Thanks!
sko

May 24, 2012 at 1:45 AM

Great stuff. Hope for a VS 11 version soon...
tkowalczyk

May 24, 2012 at 9:39 AM

Awesome !
FahimSunesra

May 24, 2012 at 10:35 AM

Awesome!! Now I can visually debug call stack in multithreaded application. Excited
devlife3

May 25, 2012 at 8:03 AM

Definitely amazing! Great job.
Sami Ben Grine

May 28, 2012 at 1:31 PM

Very nice... the MT version looks fantastic.

It be useful to:
- have a Pro version
- persist and reuse canvas (with nodes locked in position)
- export the view (to graphml for instance)
- expand / collapse nodes
- group node
- show a few stats
- as mentioned in the video, improve layout
MrAndersen

May 30, 2012 at 12:04 AM

The debugger canvas is an interesting way of displaying multithreaded debugging. It's not very different from parallel stacks and I guess that parallel stacks was the inspiration for creating the debugger canvas.
What I could really need as a developer, is however a much simpler solution: To be able to debug the thread I'm currently looking at and ignoring all other threads. This would allow me to continue stepping down the path I'm on without being interrupted by other threads stepping down the same path.
Usually, when I'm debugging, I'm not focusing on what every thread does (Focusing on too many things cause information overload). Instead I'm focusing on what my current thread is doing and it would be very nice to be able to do so, without my focus being moved to what other (And to me irrelevant) threads are doing.