Visual Studio 2010: Brief view at debug history

Visual Studio 2010 introduces also some new debugging features. One of them is debug history. Debug history enables you to track all the points on track of control flow and it also monitors activities that you cannot see otherwise. It makes debugging of hard to find problems much easier, I think. Of course, there are many other new and cool debugging features available.

Image on right shows how debug history windows looks like. You can click on image to see it at original size. As there are usually many steps of code execution shown it is very convenient if we are able to filter messages somehow.

You can filter debug history by step category and thread. The last filtering option is specially useful when building multithreaded applications. You can also switch some filters off when you are looking for debugger messages located at specific categories.

Screenshot on right shows one cool thing more – debug history contains also information about registry and file system access. I think it makes hunting of hard to find bugs more easier than before (why is SharePoint first thing that I remember when somebody mentions hard to find bugs…:) ).

When you click on debug history entry then history entry will be expanded. On the following screenshot fragment you can see what information is given when debugger hits breakpoint.

As you can see, debug history is very powerful feature. It makes it much easier to track you code flow and control steps that your code has executed. Debug history window is also able to show data hierarchically. You have to modify some settings to turn hierarchical debug data on. I will blog about it in near future. So, stay tuned!