2.3. VS2010 Premium and Ultimate

I will only be covering VS2010 Professional edition in this book, but I want to make you aware of a couple of fantastic features available in more expensive versions.

2.3.1. Generate Sequence Diagram

The Generate Sequence Diagram feature creates a diagram of a methods calls. To use this feature, simply right-click a function and select Generate Sequence Diagram.

2.3.2. Historical Debugging (Team System Edition Only)

Visual Studio Team System edition contains a very cool feature called Historical Debugging. Ian Who, a developer on the profiler team, says the following about it:

The Historical Debugger plays a role similar to that of a black box in a plane. We keep track of important points in your programs execution and allow you to play back what happened at those points at a later time.

http://blogs.msdn.com/ianhu/archive/2009/05/13/historical-debugging-in-visual-studio-team-system-2010.aspx

2.3.3. Static Analysis of Code Contracts

Code contracts (which I cover in Chapter 3) allow you to express constraints within code that can be analyzed at compile time to check if your code violates them. Although code contracts are present in all versions of Visual Studio, only Premium and Ultimate provide static analysis.