Debugger Canvas Available for Download!

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I’m pleased to announce that Debugger Canvas is available for download on DevLabs!  Debugger Canvas is a Power Tool for Visual Studio 2010 SP1 that pulls together the code you’re exploring onto a single pan-and-zoom display. As you hit breakpoints or step into code, Debugger Canvas shows just the methods that you’re debugging, with call lines and local variables, to help you see the bigger picture.  See my previous post Introducing Debugger Canvas for the demo video.

We’ve heard you loud and clear that you wish Debugger Canvas wasn’t Ultimate-only.  We would love to make Debugger Canvas available to a wider audience, but as Soma says on his blog, Debugger Canvas is built on top of Visual Studio Ultimate so that we could re-use the underlying technology for the Dependency Diagrams to identify and display the right fragments on the canvas.  This re-use is what made it possible for us to release an out-of-band power tool in an efficient manner on top of Visual Studio 2010.  It's unlikely that we'll be able to make this version of the power tool available in Pro, but please let us know if you'd like to see this kind of user experience built directly "in the box" as part of Visual Studio.

In the mean time, if you don’t have Visual Studio Ultimate then you still have two options to try Debugger Canvas for free:

1) Install the free Visual Studio Ultimate Trial, or
2) Install the free Virtual Machine containing Visual Studio Ultimate.

The second option is probably the most convenient since Visual Studio Ultimate is already pre-installed on the machine.  All you need to do is copy the Debugger Canvas VSIX into the virtual machine and install it.

Please send us your questions and feedback on the Debugger Canvas DevLabs Forum.  Thanks!

Comments

  • Anonymous
    June 14, 2011
    Congratulations, have been waiting for this for sometime, will give it a try :)

  • Anonymous
    June 16, 2011
    I've been playing with it the last 2 days, it's very cool.

  • Anonymous
    June 20, 2011
    Why hasn't this been released the standard way, via Extension Manager Online Gallery? That would allow auto-updating, etc

  • Anonymous
    July 14, 2011
    Need scroll bars, when a window appears need a way to resize it. grabbing the side dose not work.

  • Anonymous
    July 14, 2011
    Brilliant.  I would love to see this in Visual Studio.  Although it is out of my reach as we only have the Pro version.

  • Anonymous
    August 15, 2011
    Here it works fine in the Premium version of Visual Studio... so where does the Ultimate requirement really come from?

  • Anonymous
    September 02, 2011
    It would be nice if the Debugger Canvas page had a Version History.  That way I could know if new versions were out (and maybe the bugs that were bugging me were fixed).   I would try it again if I knew there was a new version.  But there is no way to know that short of installing again and checking to see if something has changed.

  • Anonymous
    September 22, 2011
    I was hoping to use the Debugger Canvas to attach to a running process (w3p) and break into my code, does it support this? The only way I could guess on doing this was to attach, create a new canvas, then to try and search using the floating toolbar to add a method which I knew I'd call into. Unfortunately this crashes VS2010, so additionally is there somewhere we can report bugs?