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Taking the Pain Out of Debugging With Live Programming
angry tapir writes "'Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place,' Brian Kernighan once wrote (adding: 'So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?') However, Sean McDirmid, a researcher at Microsoft, has been working to remove some of the pain from debugging. McDirmid, based at Microsoft Research Asia, has been studying ways of implementing usable live programming environments: a solution that is less intrusive than classical debuggers. The idea is to essentially provide a programming environment in which editing of code and the execution of code occur simultaneously — and in the same interface as code editing — with tools to track the state of variables in a more or less live manner."
I've personally fallen in love with Visual Studio. It's definitely the planets most feature-rich and capable IDE. It supports wide array of languages, has great debugging options and performs really well. The best thing is that Visual Studio Express is completely free.
It's also great to see Microsoft Research's latest offerings. They have always been the monolith research club of the industry. It's nice to see that Microsoft is really dedicated to support research.
That being said, I'm quite sure we will see the fruits of this research in an even better Visual Studio based product. Microsoft really cares about programmers and developers and helps all of them write efficient and clean code. Helping the debugging process is just second part of it.
I would, however, also love to see better support for debuggers like OllyDbg. It's basically assembler level debugger for programs that have been already compiled. It's binary code analysis is unmatched in the industry. Compiling these two will lead to synergies.
All in all, Microsoft Visual Studio keeps getting better!