Nonnenberg's Notes

Scott-
This doesn't fit into UI stuff (so I'll pester you with it instead of Jim :-)), but who can I talk to (or just send desparate pleas to) to enable DATA based breakpoints in VB.NET? It has been a hardship losing this from VB6. You may not remember me, I was the one asking about debuggerdisplay attributes and wanting to see if it would allow me to drill into ADO.NET objects (and subsequent collections). Again, something that was possible in VB6. I understand that the differences in .NET might have made this a lot harder, but I was so sad not to see these things (so far) in the Whidbey bits.

When debugging and want to drag a variable into the watch window, its a pain if one doesnt get it highlighted correctly and when you go to drag and drop this onto the watch window you end up scrolling half a project full of source and have to find your way back to the breakpoint.

Any better way of preventing this, its as annoying as pre XP explorer.exe taskbar moving when its not locked.

Yeah and any notion of having things hidden from the debugger at the source level is plain stupid. its like

[DebugHide(true)]
public class blah
{
// Full of bugs in code here
}

Dont even go there.

Yeah and those debug watch windows. How about having intellisense popup when I start to complete a type just like it does in the editor. Would save me time when wanting to place a watch on some members.

Yeah and in the watch window you can cause a CRASH of the debugger if you try to evaluate..

Convert.ToDouble(someDoubleVal);

Nasty.

"Ben", you'll be happy to know that we have introduced intellisense in the watch window for Whidbey.

I wasn't able to get your debugger "Convert" crash to happen either - was there something else you did?

Dragging to the watch window is a bit of a precise process, that is true. In Whidbey we've introduced enhanced datatips, which allow you to view complex data right in the code, instead of always dragging to the watch windows.

What about some kind of HUD where you can overlay the code in the debugger without mouse hovers.

"Ben", why don't you email me (the Contact link at the top left of the page) so we can talk about your ideas a bit more in-depth? That HUD concept deserves a fuller description from you. :0)

How about force feedback for the really stupid bugs, a steel spike could ram up form the chair or a hand pop out and slap the SDE senseless, could make it the "Comedy Animations" mode in Tools->Options.

How extensible is this debugger, can I code up a COM plugin (or even better, a .NET assembly plugin so I dont have to get knee deep in COM poo) to add some ideas to the debugger for data presentation.

I think it would be better if I had some ideas in a plugin for easier demonstration of this HUD concept. Where can I find the API documentation on MSDN for plugins for enhancing the debugger?