New debugging experience in Visual Studio - Debugger Canvas

A new project just released by Microsoft's DevLabs unit has been making waves today as a revolutionary way to debug code.

The Debugger Canvas project is a new user experience designed for the latest release of Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate and aims to reduce the amount of code developers need to keep in their heads while working through a debugging problem.

The extension works by laying out a particular call path on a single screen, clearly highlighting the routes between methods. Each method gets its own window with a fully featured editor inside thanks to the modular features of the new Visual Studio version. Intellitrace support improves the experience even more, providing additional information where required.

The developers, a collaborative team between Microsoft Research and Brown University in the US, highlight that debugging is not the only potential for this visualisation - in future versions it will be possible to navigate your code when not debugging it in this manner. Out of the box it supports C# and VB, with more languages to come.

Give the Debugger Canvas a go by downloading it from the DevLabs website.

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