Excellent Debugging Features in Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Pin Inspect Value During Debugging
• Drag-Drop Pin Data Tip
• Adding Comments
• Last Session Debugging Value
• Summary
• History

Introduction

The Visual Studio 2010 IDE is simply great and came up with many new features within it. I have found one of the great and innovative features in Debugging style in VS 2010 Professional Beta 2 that is Pin/Unpin Object/Variable Inspect or Data Tip.

Pin Inspect Value During Debugging

While debugging in Visual Studio, we generally used mouse over on the object or variable to inspect the current value. This shows the current data items held by the inspected object. But this is for a limited time, as long as the mouse is pointed to that object those value will be available. But in Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2, there is a great feature to pin and unpin this inspected value. We can pin as many of any object and their sub object value also. Please have a look into the below picture:

When you mouse over on the inspect object, you will get pin icon with each and every object's properties, variable. Click on that pin icon to make it pined. Unless you manually close these pined items, they will be visible in the IDE.

Drag-Drop Pin Data Tip

We can easily Drag and drop the data tip inside the Visual Studio IDE. This is quite helpful if we need to see some object value list in the bottom section of code. We can easily drag those pined data tips over there.

Adding Comments

We can add comments on the pined data tip. For providing comments, we need to click on “Expand to see the comments” button. This will brings up an additional textbox to add comments.

Below is some demonstration of Adding comments on pined inspect value:

Last Session Debugging Value

This is another great feature of Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 debugging. If we pined some data tip during the debugging, the value of pined item will remain stored in a session. In normal mode of coding, if you mouse over the pin icon, it will show the details of the last debugging session value as the below picture:

Summary

Though the article is very small, I think this is very interesting and will help lots of newcomers of VS 2010 IDE. Please share your feedback and suggestions.

History

• Initial post - 4^th Jan 2010