In the video below I’ll show you how this feature helped solve a bug in a unit test of a 3D game:

If you like this feature, please share our video with your friends!

Bug fixes

In this version we’ve improved our support for the “Start New Instance” command and fixed some rare bugs that caused BugAid’s “Full Mode” features to stop working in the middle of the debugging session.

To see the full list of the changes, please see our Version History.

Basic Silverlight support

With this version, it is now possible to debug Silverlight in BugAid’s standard mode. Full mode support is coming soon!

Microsoft Silverlight

To see the full list of the changes, please see our Version History.

Resizeable debug window (datatip)

Now that BugAid is more stable, we’ve turned to implemented our most requested features.  The first request to be fulfilled is the ability to resize the debug window, also known as the datatip.

With that done, we’re turning to the other requests in the list. If you haven’t before, be sure to vote and add additional ideas!

To see the full list of the changes, please see our Version History.

When I initially started debugging, I discovered that the data I get when hovering over these objects wasn’t very useful to me:

This happened because the default ToString implementation of the object blurts out the structure of the parsed code, but what I really wanted to see is just the actual C# code that the object translates to.

And so, having already written a method called ToCSharpCode that takes in an object and returns the C# code it represents, I went on to add a custom expression:

The important thing to take away from the last screenshot is that I intentionally expanded the “base” nodes and chose to add the Custom Expression on the the highest base class in the class hierarchy that the custom expression is applicable to. This will ensure that my Custom Expression will appear not only on BinaryOperatorExpressions, but also on IfElseStatements, AssignmentExpressions, and so forth.

Next, I wrote my Custom Expression:

I used C#’s comment syntax (//) to give my custom expression a shorter name: “C#”.
And finally, I starred my Custom Expression, so it will always right next to the variable name:

A new maintenance version of BugAid is released and ready for download – 0.5.1520.8518.

DotCover/Pex&Moles compatibility and bug fixes

Several users complained about an issue where installing BugAid caused problems in JetBrains’ dotCover and Microsoft’s Pex & Moles. BugAid now detects these tools and offers to enable compatibility with them (at some cost to full-mode performance).

Moreover we’ve fixed several bugs that caused a lot of error notifications and could potentially disrupt a debugging session.

To see the full list of the changes, please see our Version History.

From NuGet to NHibernate to NUnit, you can hardly do any serious .NET development work today without coming to rely on these great collaborations between people from different countries, working together to create quality software for the benefit of us all.

“BugAid for Visual Studio”, specifically, relies on the excellent SharpDevelop libraries for all of our code parsing and semantic analysis. It’d be fair to say that without the passion, hard work, and huge talent of the people who’ve contributed to these libraries, our project would not have been possible. Furthermore, we’ve come to rely on Google Code Search as an indispensable tool in our day-to-day work.

With this in mind, we’ve decided to announce that “BugAid for Visual Studio” is now free (as in beer and nachos) for non-commercial open source development. If you are actively engaged in .NET open source development, now would be the time to apply for your free one-year license!

Please note though, that the BugAid Open Source license can only be used for non-commercial open source development, so if you’re an open source hacker by night and a cubicle warrior by day, you’ll still need to ask your boss to buy a corporate license for you to use at work.

We hope that you’ll find BugAid useful, and continue to share your talent with the world, one commit at a time.

Bug fixes

In this version we’ve fixed several bugs and reduced BugAid’s memory consumption. We’ve also fixed a rare bug where on some computers BugAid threw an error on startup and didn’t work at all, so if you’ve tried BugAid in the past and couldn’t get it to work, please try again.

To see the full list of the changes, please see our Version History.

Running unit tests in Full Mode with Resharper

Resharper is a great help when it comes to debugging Unit Tests and now with BugAid it became even better!

As requested by our users, you can now launch and debug Unit Tests in BugAid Full Mode right from Resharper:

And then use Statement Visualization to see what’s going in your Assertions right away:

If you’re using a different Unit Test Runner and want support for BugAid Full Mode as well, feel free to request it on UserEcho.

IntelliTrace compatibility

Several users experienced compatibility issues between BugAid and IntelliTrace, where installing BugAid caused IntelliTrace “event and calls information” mode to stop working. We’d like to apologize again to our users who were affected by this. The issue was caused by BugAid creating a special kind of NGEN images (“Profile” images) for several .NET framework assemblies. The reason we create these images is that it improves the startup times of applications running in BugAid Full Mode considerably. By design this should’ve been a harmless operation, however, due to a bug in IntelliTrace, the mere presence of these images causes it to stop working properly.

If you’d like to use IntelliTrace while BugAid is installed, please use the following new configuration in BugAid’s options:

Additional improvements and bug fixes

• [UI] Improved UI of BugAid’s Options dialog
• [Fixed] Additional Full-Mode memory-leak fixes.
• [Fixed] Custom Expressions and Starred items sometimes don’t get saved when VS is closed
• [Fixed] Statement Visualization isn’t aligned correctly when zoom is bigger than 100% in VS2010
• [Fixed] The Current Directory is wrong when launching in Full Mode
• [Fixed] Using Visual Studio’s Code Definitions Window causes exceptions
• [Fixed] An error occurs when developing Silverlight and Windows Phone apps
• [Fixed] Exception on “Start Debugging” in Full Mode when no solution is loaded
• [Fixed] Statement Visualization sometimes fails in statements that include Anonymous Types
• [Fixed] Statement Visualization fails over a ‘binary or’ operation in specific scenario
• [Fixed] Statement Visualization exception when statement includes IQueryables (Special thanks to Stuart Turner for reporting this)
• [Fixed] Statement Visualization exception over string concatenation of an object
• [Fixed] Stepping over a failing assertion causes VS to hang waiting for Step Over to complete

Bug fixes

• Fixed another case in which BugAid could cause Visual Studio to hang on startup.
• Fixed an issue in which “Failed to load log4net” message box would appear.