IntelliTrace, the Historical Debugger

One of the most important new tools in Visual Studio 2010 is IntelliTrace, formerly known as the historical debugger. This tool can improve your debugging experience because it can record and navigate every event occurring during the application lifetime, such as events and failures including information on specific threads. IntelliTrace is fully integrated with the code editor and with the rest of the IDE functionalities, such as Call Stack and Locals tool windows so that it can provide a complete debugging environment. The tool is capable of recording (to a file, too) and debugging the following happenings:

• Application events, such as user interface events or application exceptions

• Playback debugging, which allows deep debugging over specific events occurred before and after a particular code block

• Unit test failures

• Load test failures and build acceptances test

• Manual tests

In this section you learn how to use IntelliTrace to debug application events, exceptions, and unit test failures. Before showing IntelliTrace in action, it is a good idea to set its options in Visual Studio.