Boost your Debugging Speed with OzCode

In a perfect world, no one needs to debug. All code is covered by tests and if something goes wrong, it’s just adding yet another test. It’s a whole other story in legacy code, where the debugger is your only chance to figure out what is going on. A tool like OzCode will make debugging a whole lot faster.

I was fascinated by the OzCode demo at this year’s NDC conference in Oslo. The team of OzCode made demo after demo on their visual debugger for Visual Studio and all the cases instantly connected. The hours I spend with debugging are uncountable and I instantly knew how that tool could have saved me weeks. I’m not kidding, the visualisations are such a great help that you can speed up debugging tremendously.

The tool isn’t free, but with 79$ a well invested sum. If you want to buy it, follow this link for a 15$ discount. (A link like that one is assigned to everyone who buys OzCode, no blog post required)

Let’s have a look on some of the features I like most.

Visualize Values

If you do pair programming, you will love this feature. OzCode displays the values of all variables in the current line on top of the variable name. You no longer have the need to hover over the variable or use the watch window. If you initialize the Demo object with 5 as a parameter, it is shown directly where you will need to know the value:

It is even better with if-statements. The part that is matched is marked in green, while all other conditions that don’t match are red. With that and the little arrow on the side you see at one glance why the code takes this execution path.

 

This is the List Element You’re Looking for

My favourite feature in OzCode is to search a list for a certain element (by name or value). When the debugger hits a list, you can start expanding it. Right below the data is a small search window where you can enter the name or value you are looking for. By default, only 3 levels are searched. Should that not be enough you can tell OzCode to go deeper. But beware, the deeper your structure is, the longer it takes.

 

All about Exceptions

Figuring out the real reason an exception was thrown is a tedious task. You need to go from one inner exception to the next until you reach the end. OzCode replaces the dialogue from Visual Studio with one that shows you all exception at once. One click is enough and you are at the first exception you care about:

The next step you normally do is to copy the exception name and google for an answer on StackOverflow.com. With OzCode you can search Stack Overflow right from the exception dialog and save time:

 

Conclusion

The visual debugger from OzCode is a great tool. I only wrote about the features I use daily, but there are many more. Don’t hesitate and buy it if you need to debug code.