About Debugger Canvas

Debugger Canvas is a new user experience for the debugger in Visual Studio Ultimate. It 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.

Version 1.1 of Debugger Canvas

The newest version of Debugger Canvas fixes bugs and improves the performance when stepping through code. It also adds some new abilities:

• Switch between Debugger Canvas and file based debugging with a single click, even in the middle of a debug session
• Debug multiple threads side by side with each thread and its most recent stack frame easily identified
• Get an overview over recursive calls by showing one bubble per invocation
• Navigate easily up and down the call stack in the canvas itself

Debugger Canvas is the result of a collaboration between Brown University and Microsoft, integrating ideas from Brown University’s Code Bubbles project into Visual Studio.

This is what you can do in this version of Debugger Canvas:

• Step into methods on a canvas using the debugger
• Use the normal debugger features in the canvas
• Share a canvas as an XPS image
• Take snapshots of local variables so you can make comparisons as you step through code multiple times
• Add related methods to the canvas using Go to Definition and Find All References

It also has some more features that are under development and which you can turn on if you’d like to try them:

• Edit code directly on the canvas (including edit and continue if available) by enabling the option in the options dialog
• Visualize IntelliTrace logs as fragments on the canvas, or step through IntelliTrace logs using the canvas

Our goal with this power tool is to try out these use interface features to see how they work in real life development situations. And depending on your feedback, some of this may very well make it into a future version of Visual Studio!

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