Parallel Stacks – new Visual Studio 2010 debugger window

Posted By: Daniel Moth | Jun 12th @ 2:21 PM | 45,015 Views | 16 Comments
UPDATED for the VS2010 Beta 2 release

Author: Hi, I am Daniel Moth Smiley

Introduction:

As developers try to take advantage of more and more cores in their applications, ultimately more and more threads will execute their code at the same time. When debugging such applications, there is a need to visualize multiple call stacks of multiple threads in a single view. This scenario is supported in Visual Studio 2010 via a new debugger window that this short video explores: Parallel Stacks.

To read more about the features of the Parallel Stacks window please read my blog posts here, here and here. To follow some steps and explore the Parallel Stacks (and Parallel Tasks) windows on your own Visual Studio 2010 installation, follow this MSDN walkthrough.
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#Jun 12th @ 2:58 PM
Dreadnaught
Dreadnaught
Respect mah authoritah!

Does anyone else see somthing besides a black screen?

#Jun 12th @ 3:13 PM
Charles
Charles
Welcome Change

I do. Watching the screencast now. Very nice, Daniel.

Dreadnaught, are you running Chrome?

C

#Jun 12th @ 3:41 PM
rhm
rhm

Works For Me(tm)

Looks like an interesting feature for ppl debugging multi-threaded code.

#Jun 12th @ 4:03 PM
DCMonkey
DCMonkey
Monkey see, monkey do, monkey will destroy you!

I'm running Chorme and do see a black screen as well. Works in IE though.

#Jun 12th @ 4:18 PM
Charles
Charles
Welcome Change

Can you watch any of the videos on the site with Chrome+Silverlight?

C

#Jun 12th @ 4:30 PM
DCMonkey
DCMonkey
Monkey see, monkey do, monkey will destroy you!

Yeah. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, even on the same video. And if it's blank there's usually a flash of the player controls before it goes black.

#Jun 12th @ 6:29 PM
magicalclick
magicalclick

Nice screen cast. Hope this works on Express also. Looks really useful for parralle debuding. BTW, I am using IE, so it works.

 

#Jun 12th @ 6:42 PM
Daniel Moth
Daniel Moth
Developer

rhm, thanks. yes this debugging window also supports native programming models such as PPL and even more so with the Tasks view of the Parallel Stacks window and also the Parallel Tasks window – I'll show those in my next screencast.

#Jun 12th @ 6:44 PM
Daniel Moth
Daniel Moth
Developer

magicalclick, glad you liked it… Unfortunately, this debugger window is not available in the Express SKU, but it is available in all other VS2010 SKUs. The marketing folks thought this feature was too valuable to give for free and it was hard for me to argue with them on that point… Note that the parallel APIs are of course included with the Express SKUs.

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