What’s new in Visual Studio Team System 2010: Episode 2

Feature: Historical Debugger

In my previous post, I mentioned that one of the key scenarios that my team is working on is eliminating the "No Repro" scenario. Let’s take a look at what this actually means. Let’s say that you’re a developer and you are trying to reproduce a bug in your code. This is often a time consuming task and if you’re unlucky, you won’t even be able to reproduce the issue. At Microsoft, when a bug or issue is not reproducible, we mark it as "Not Repro". Alas, a “No Repro” bug is both unproductive and frustrating.

In Visual Studio Team System 2010, we’ve introduced a feature that for now we are calling the Historical Debugger (this name will most likely change by the time we release the RTM version of VSTS 2010). The goal of this new feature is to significantly cut down the time it takes to debug an issue by recording what the application does and be able to replay the recording (or log) in Visual Studio. By recording what the application does as it is running, our goal is cut down the number of "No Repro" bugs.

Here is a short demo of the Historical Debugger. The usual caveat applies: This is only an early glimpse of the functionality and we still have a lot of work left before the release.

Habib Heydarian.