Historical Debugger and Test Impact Analysis in Visual Studio Team System 2010

Posted By: Brian Keller | Oct 2nd @ 11:26 AM

Are you tired of constantly setting breakpoints to hone in on a pesky bug? How would you like to be able to step "back in time" through your debugger? The Historical Debugger in Visual Studio Team System 2010 promises to revolutionize your debugging experience. Habib Heydarian takes us through a demonstration of just a few of its capabilities.

But wait... there's more! Habib also shows us the new Test Impact Analysis feature his team is working on. With Test Impact Analysis it's possible to determine which of your tests will be... well... impacted by the code changes you're making! Not only does this mean that your unit test suite can run more quickly, but it can also lead to better testing and fewer bugs in software projects.

This "Humanized Screencast" is best viewed at fullscreen using the high-quality WMV download.

Tags: Software Testing, Testing, Visual Studio, Visual Studio 2010, Visual Studio Team System 2010, VSTS

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Comments (10)

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bob53050

Great demo. So when can we get the CTP bits???? Smiley

Bob Hanson

briankel

In reply to bob53050

#Oct 2nd @ 4:55 PM

Hi Bob -

Brian Harry has said "soon" on his blog. Beyond that, of course, we're going to keep you guessing. Smiley

JoshRoss
JoshRoss

You guys do such a great job on encoding content to silverlight, that I feel cheated when you don't.

BSalita

Blind feedback: Before watching the video (dinner first), I want my 3rd party .Net language to be able to create historical snapshots (or whatever they're called). For example, traditionally, programmer errors would occur before and after file open statements or when spawning processes. Can my runtime tell the debugger to create a snapshot and name it? How will histroical debugging be exposed for 3rd party languages?

darrellp

Okay, I hate to be dense, but this is the first time in my life I've seen a "humanized screencast" or heard of a "high quality WMV download". When I try running this regularly it constantly stops and reloads. So it's lovely to know that it's best to view it in this new way but it would be lovelier if I knew what I needed to do in order to view it with a "high quality WMV download" whatever that is. Sadly, while several of your videos on Ch9 suggest this, none of them offers anything in the way of instruction on exactly how to get such a thing. Can anybody please bother to provide me with that info? Thanks!

briankel

In reply to darrellp

#Oct 5th @ 3:26 AM

Darrell - mouseover the "Downloads" tab, right-click the file in there (it's a .WMV) and save locally before viewing. This way you won't have to fight buffering problems. And yes, this is the first time you're seeing "humanized screencast" - we coined that term on Channel 9 to represent the format of these videos (PiP video + screencast) as opposed to our other videos which are either screencast or video camera.

KilKenny1

Is the Historical Debugger going to depend on a Visual Studio installation or just the .NET Framework?
It would be great if it could be hooked up to a running production application so we don't have to capture dumps.

schroedl

Good stuff. I get that the test impact feature will not be immediately available for Native C++ apps (We want it!). Will the historical debugger snapshots work with native C++ code? Please!!

John

Habib Heydarian

In reply to KilKenny1

#Oct 6th @ 10:54 PM

We are working towards having a solution where you don't need VS installed to be able to collect a log file for the Historical Debugger. We haven't finalized a plan yet, so I can't go into detail about what the final experience will be.

Thanks,
HabibH.