29DEC 2011

Getting Started with Debugger Canvas – An aid in your daily development (debugging) tasks


Posted by Tobias Zimmergren

Author: Tobias Zimmergren | www.tozit.com | @zimmergren

Introduction

Sometimes when you’re in a development project you can feel the pain of debugging. If there’s a lot of code floating around it may be hard to sort out the method calls and how the depend on each other if it’s a very complex solution. To ease the task of debugging there’s a great VS 2010 plugin called Debugger Canvas, which will help you to sort out a lot of the hassle while debugging.

In this article we’ll just take a quick look at what Debugger Canvas is and how it can assist us in our daily debugging adventures.

Getting Started with Debugger Canvas

Firstly, you obviously need to download the extension for Visual Studio 2010, which can be done HERE.

Please note: The Debugger Canvas Extensions are only available for VS 2010 Ultimate

Debugger Canvas in Action

When you’ve installed the extension, there’s a few new opportunities presented when debugging. Your new “F5” experience will be based on the new Debugger Canvas UI instead of the traditional debugging experience which means you’ll be able to more easily follow the calls within your code, like this:

image

When you step into the code deeper, you’ll see how the calls were made quite easily:

image

Summary

You should definitely take a look at Debugger Canvas if you haven’t already as it’ll be most helpful for you in your development adventures.

Get a better overview here and watch the introductory video!

Enjoy.

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  • Groundhog667

    Holy Cr#p! Been playing around with it in some very complex projects! Extremely powerfull! A shame that it is only for Ultimate. A lot of guys and grrls won’t be aple to use this because of the price (of vs2010 ultimate).

    • http://www.zimmergren.net/ Tobias Zimmergren

      You should look into getting MSDN subscriptions which will make sense for any corporation doing custom development and/or work in the IT sector. But I do agree that it would be awesome to see if it’d work with the Express suites.