Debugger Canvas Tricks and Wishes

Debugger UI’s haven’t changed much at all since I started doing Windows development way back in 1990. You have a call stack, memory, and locals windows that are using code older than many of you looking at them. I really love the idea of the new Debugger Canvas as a fresh and interesting way of looking at debugging. If you have Visual Studio Ultimate, you have to give it a try.

One of the first things you’ll find out about Debugger Canvas is that you’ll yearn for at least two 30 inch monitors very quickly. I like to use a larger font for my code windows and as Debugger Canvas use the default font, I was scrolling like crazy and wishing for like four 30 inch monitors. I quickly found the CTRL+MOUSEWHEEL trick of zooming in and out, but what I really wanted was a way to just reduce the size of the text and not make the title bar and locals link so miniscule I couldn’t hit them with my mouse.

Fortunately, the editor commands View.ZoomIn and View.ZoomOut work to increase and decrease the text size without changing the bubble sizes. With the General keyboard, those map to the CTRL+CHIFT+.(period) and CTRL+SHIFT+, (comma) for View.ZoomIn and View.ZoomOut, respectively. Of course, you can always remap those keys to something else.

In a future release of Debugger Canvas, I’d love to see that there’s a separate font setting for Debugger Canvas so we don’t have to manually change the font each time a bubble comes up. Even better, I think it would be neat to have the current focused bubble show larger than the others. That way as you mouse over the bubbles they would grow in size to read everything and all the other bubbles would shrink to fit in the view you are using.