TechEd 2008 overheard: Historical debugger
On the escalator, I overheard someone telling his colleague about an upcoming feature, the Visual Studio Historical Debugger.
It’ll let you step backward in time. Program threw an exception? You don’t have to just look at where it stopped; you’ll actually be able to step backward to find out how the program got into that state.
I asked the guy about it, and he said it’ll be in the next version of Visual Studio, code-named Rosario. Since I only overheard part of a conversation, and didn’t actually attend the session where he’d seen the demo, that’s about all I know, so don’t ask me for details or release dates. I assume you’ll have to tell it when to start and stop recording, but that’s just an educated guess. The above link has a tiny bit more info and a couple of screenshots.
This isn’t a new idea; there’s been an “omniscient debugger” for Java for at least a year. But it’ll be pretty awesome to have it available for a language I use.
So… any chance of Delphi ever getting this? (grin)
June 3rd, 2008 at 4:17 pm
Sounds slow, memory hungry, and awesome.
I assume they’ll attempt to limit the hit by limiting the “time frame”. Anything less than several hundred statements might not be worth the effort tho.
Makes me wonder about file & network accesses tho - true danger lies there, so its safe useful scope is going to be somewhat limited.
June 4th, 2008 at 5:42 am
The Turbo Pascal debuggers did have Backstep once upon a time, if I remember correctly…
June 4th, 2008 at 4:17 pm
Lars,
I remember the feature from Turbo Debugger too.
June 5th, 2008 at 7:41 am
Lars/Anders:
Yes, the standalone Turbo Debugger had that back-step feature, but only at the assembly code level, obviously.
June 5th, 2008 at 11:38 am
Something near to (but not quite
is to be found at
http://blogs.codegear.com/chrishesik/2007/04/30/34241
June 5th, 2008 at 2:30 pm
Not even similar. That doesn’t record variable values as you go.