Debugger Canvas Available for Download!

I’m pleased to announce that Debugger Canvas is available for download on DevLabs!  Debugger Canvas is a Power Tool for Visual Studio 2010 SP1 that 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.  See my previous post Introducing Debugger Canvas for the demo video.

We’ve heard you loud and clear that you wish Debugger Canvas wasn’t Ultimate-only.  We would love to make Debugger Canvas available to a wider audience, but as Soma says on his blog, Debugger Canvas is built on top of Visual Studio Ultimate so that we could re-use the underlying technology for the Dependency Diagrams to identify and display the right fragments on the canvas.  This re-use is what made it possible for us to release an out-of-band power tool in an efficient manner on top of Visual Studio 2010.  It's unlikely that we'll be able to make this version of the power tool available in Pro, but please let us know if you'd like to see this kind of user experience built directly "in the box" as part of Visual Studio.

In the mean time, if you don’t have Visual Studio Ultimate then you still have two options to try Debugger Canvas for free:

1) Install the free Visual Studio Ultimate Trial, or
2) Install the free Virtual Machine containing Visual Studio Ultimate.

The second option is probably the most convenient since Visual Studio Ultimate is already pre-installed on the machine.  All you need to do is copy the Debugger Canvas VSIX into the virtual machine and install it.

Please send us your questions and feedback on the Debugger Canvas DevLabs Forum.  Thanks!