Visual Studio 2011 IDE advancements

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New Visual Studio is around the corner. Microsoft Corporate Division VC, Somasegar has given a sneak peak to new IDE features in his blog.

I find this is promising. Especially, with Visual Studio 2010, we’ve found completely revamped architecture for extending Visual Studio. On the other hand, Whole Tomato is a company, which had shown what customers really wanted out of Visual Studio. Their Visual Assist X plugin is an excellent piece of art. There are other famous guys who sells similar softwares like DevExpress. But I personally prefer VA, because it’s light weight and not leaving much confusions with cluttered interfaces like others.

Visual Studio Power Tools is another awesome free option to improve your productivity. But I believe Microsoft can do well with their IDEs. Ever since Visual Studio 2003, we’ve not gained anything better out of Microsoft IDEs. Almost 8 years, though Microsoft has introduced a bunch of technologies and language improvements especially for C#, the IDE remains a substandard for the world’s biggest developer community.

Visual Studio 2011 is a positive improvement where the art of search with regular expression integrated well with to find information quickly.

Read the full scoop here in Soma’s blog

WinDBG: How to list call stack of all threads in managed dump/application?

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Even before analyzing the dump using !analyze with a crash/hang dump, I really wanted to see all threads call stack in a single shot. Mostly I use ~*kb to list the call stack with all threads for a native application/dump with WinDBG.

But WinDBG and .NET call stacks aren’t in a good sync. We will have to load SOS.dll or SOSEX.dll to get better help with debugging.

You can use !EEStack of SOS.dll to display call stack of all threads.


.load C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\SOS.dll
!EEStack

Code Analysis – Visual C++ 2011

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Microsoft finally including code analysis to detect the problematic code that could lead to crash and create security woes.

•Fixing a bug early avoids wasted time debugging strange crashes or reliability issues later on.
•Fixing a bug early avoids resetting/repeating testing after a bug is fixed late in the development cycle.
•Fixing a bug early avoids the complexities associated with fixing it if it is exposed after the application ships.

The Security Science team with the Microsoft Security Engineering Centre (MSEC) worked closely with the Visual Studio Code Analysis team to ensure that the Visual Studio Developer Preview includes as many of the SDL mandatory C/C++ Code Analysis warnings as possible. These are the security-related warnings that Microsoft considers critical to fix for internal C/C++ software development.

This feature is included in Visual Studio 2011 Express as well.

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