Quite often, one or more developers need to collaborate on a bug to figure out the root cause of the problem. This collaboration is typically done using tools like email, bug tracking system (e.g. TFS) or if the developers are collocated, they might work on the bug together in one of their offices. Here...

One of the key benefits of IntelliTrace is that it collects lots of useful information about your application which allows you to debug exactly what the application was doing when a problem occurred. With so much information, it's important to be able to search for the specific data that led to the bug...

One of the easiest ways to understand what IntelliTrace is and what it does, is through a comparison between how most developers debug their application today vs. what IntelliTrace enables. In the figure below, the blue section labeled (1) shows one of the most common ways that developers debug their...

I was talking to someone the other day and he asked me whether Visual Studio has a tool to count the lines of code in an application. It occurred to me that others might be interested in the answer so I decided to blog about it. There is a tool called Code Metrics in Visual Studio 2008 and 2010 that...

During the last few months, I've been blogging extensively about a new Visual Studio 2010 feature called IntelliTrace (formerly known as the "Historical Debugger"). We are very excited about IntelliTrace and think that it's going to change how people debug their applications. Since IntelliTrace...

A few months ago, I blogged about how to view the return value of a C# or VB method in the Visual Studio debugger. As I explained in that blog post, the debugger does not support viewing the return value of a .NET method, so you have to apply a workaround or two. Being able to see the return value of...

When using IntelliTrace, you might run across the following error message in the IntelliTrace window: IntelliTrace is not available. See the Debugger Output window or the Windows Application Events Log. Below is a list of reasons why you might see the above error message when trying to use IntelliTrace...

In my previous post Getting Started with Visual Studio 2010 IntelliTrace: Hello IntelliTrace! , I described how to use the new IntelliTrace feature in Visual Studio 2010 to debug an application. But there's more to IntelliTrace. IntelliTrace also allows you step back in the debugger! However, the step...

One of the most talked about features in Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 is IntelliTrace. In a nutshell, IntelliTrace allows a developer to record the application execution and play it back. Using IntelliTrace, a developer can do some cool things like step back in the debugger. In this blog post, I'll do a...

Over the last few months, I've blogged a fair amount about a new feature in Visual Studio 2010 called the Historical Debugger. With the announcement of Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 also comes a name change for the Historical Debugger. It is now called IntelliTrace™. Background: We literally spent over two...

If you have written managed code that uses a COM object, then you are probably familiar with System.__ComObject . When a COM object lacks a Runtime Callable Wrapper (RCW), the CLR provides a generic RCW which is an instance of the type "System.__ComObject". Unfortunately, one of the downsides...

During the last couple of months, I've covered the Historical Debugger extensively. If you are interested in learning more about this new feature in Visual Studio 2010, the following blog entries should help you get started. An in depth look at the Historical Debugger in Visual Studio 2010 (Part I) An...

In previous blogs, I have covered the Historical Debugger extensively and talked about many of the scenarios. In this post, I'll walk through another scenario where the Historical Debugger is very useful which is Load Testing. When loading testing an application, you can have the Historical Debugger...

In a previous blog , I covered how to debug a LINQ to SQL query using the Historical Debugger. In this blog, I'll discuss using the Historical Debugger to debug an exception. The are a couple of reasons why the Historical Debugger is so useful when it comes to debugging exceptions: If your application...

Last weekend, I spent a good 30 minutes trying to figure out why I wasn't hitting a breakpoint in a method. Admittedly, I wasn't very familiar with the code since I hadn't written it. It turned out that the method wasn't being called from anywhere, so it was essentially "dead code". I wanted...

Like any software product, with every new release of Visual Studio, we add numerous new features to support additional scenarios, improve existing features based on customer feedback and occasionally, we remove some features based on a number of factors such as lack of customer demand, quality issues...

In a recent Channel 9 10-4 video, Brian Keller introduced the Historical Debugger in Visual Studio Team System 2010. One of the features that he described in his video was the Historical Debugger Navigation Bar (Navbar) which he used to step back in the application. In this post, I'm going to describe...

Code Analysis in Visual Studio Team System can be extremely helpful when it comes to pointing out subtle bugs that are hard to detect even via code inspection. One example is dealing with NaN. NaN which stands for Not a Number , represents a constant where the result of an arithmetic operation is undefined...

In Visual Studio 2008 and earlier releases, one of the key complaints is that the debugger doesn't allow you to debug 64-bit mixed mode (managed and native) applications. In fact, if you try to debug a 64-bit mixed mode application, you will see an error that is similar to the following. -----------...

I've covered the Visual Studio 2010 Historical Debugger extensively in a few of the previous posts. In this post, I'll cover how the Historical Debugger makes debugging LINQ to SQL queries a lot more convenient. If you are trying to debug a LINQ to SQL query, often it helps to look at the generated T...

One of the new features that we've added to the Visual Studio 2010 debugger is the ability to manage breakpoints more effectively. You might say that the existing Breakpoints window is a fine tool for being able to manage your breakpoints. After all, you can create, modify and delete breakpoints using...

In an earlier blog , I described how to use the new WPF Visualizer to debug WPF applications in Visual Studio 2010. We've added another feature that further improves the debugging experience for WPF applications. The Visual Studio 2010 debugger can now automatically display tracing information from a...

This should make many C/C++ developers happy when Visual Studio 2010 becomes available (you can download Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 right now). In previous versions of Visual Studio, one of the complains that we've received is that developers want to use string manipulation functions like strcmp() and...

There are numerous ways to view variables in the Visual Studio debugger. You can use the Autos window, Locals window, Quick Watch, four different Watch windows, etc. In Visual Studio 2010, we've made it even easier to see the value of variables. Over the years, we've conducted countless usability studies...

In Visual Studio 2010, we have added the ability to import and export breakpoints. There are several scenarios where being able to import/export breakpoints is useful. For example, you can share breakpoints with other developers in your organization. Example: Hand off bug to another developer Here is...