Historical Debugger and Test Impact Analysis in Visual Studio Team System 2010

The Discussion

• 

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

   

  Bob Hanson

• 

  Hi Bob -
  
  Brian Harry has said "soon" on his blog. Beyond that, of course, we're going to keep you guessing.

• 

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

• 

  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?

• 

  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!

• 

  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.

• 

  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.

• 

  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

• 

  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.

• 

  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.

• 

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

• 

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

• 

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

• 

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

• 

  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!!

• 

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

• 

  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

• 

  Looking forward for native C++ support!

• 

  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