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Visual Studio Devs Ask Santa for Debugging Gifts
Microsoft is always soliciting feedback to help guide its development tooling efforts, most recently asking developers to weigh in with their requests to Santa for new debugging functionality in the form of a "debug-tastic" gift.
The Visual Studio Debugger team this week took to a social media platform with a post to ask devs:
🎅 If you could ask Santa for a "debug-tastic" gift and have him add one magic wand feature to the Visual Studio's Debugging and Diagnostics universe, what wild tech treat would you request?
[Click on image for larger view.] Ask Santa for a "Debug-Tastic" Gift (source: X).
Out of 16 replies, we culled the spam/ads to list these requests:
- How about a feature like break/trace points that jumps to a different place in the code every time it's hit? There are times when I just want to skip a section of code while debugging.
- Does Santa grant bug fixes too? Fix the bug: Windows exception during mixed debugging truncates stack #12231 (last part paraphrased)
- 🙏 add pre-run custom commands that would return the real process id to attach to, such that I could write simple PowerShell scripts to prepare and launch a process. Right now the debugger can only directly launch an executable, or manually attach to an existing one
- Hey Santa! Disk is cheap, my time is expensive. Create some kind of log so I can grab it from the customer's machine, load it to vs and replay the situation with debugger. No, process dumps are just one point in time and require a PhD
- That's an easy question, stepping into native code when debugging C# in VSCode.
- Filter profiling results to the duration of a given function in the call stack. In many cases a single function is the entry point to relevant code to be profiled. Would be great to narrow down all that data to the timespan that function is in the call stack.
- Has anyone else noticed Visual Studio becoming unbearably slow at loading debugging symbols?
- Don't lock advanced debugging behind the enterprise edition?
- IntelliSense in the Watch Window
- View >> Other Windows >> Show Bugs Explorer
- Make iOS and Android runnable/debuggable again. Dev Kit isn't there yet and VS4mac is no more…
- Exception Settings should have the ability to save named groups of exceptions. I often have 'usual suspects' specific to different scenarios, and would like to be able to turn on/off prepared groups of exceptions.
- keyboard hook timeout of frozen process tweaked so debug experience isn't terrible. coz sometimes we need that stuff.
The team provided a couple alternative solutions to feature requests right in the thread, which was viewed 6,622 times at the time of this writing. We'll have to wait and see what happens with the others. Microsoft is usually pretty good about incorporating community-provided feature requests at its Developer Community site, but that process can take years.
The team didn't indicate where to go to provide any further feedback on Visual Studio debugging, but general Visual Studio feedback is provided here.
About the Author
David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.