Monday, February 11, 2008 #

Vista: Developer Hostile

All I did was call System.Diagnostics.Debugger.Break(). You’d think I’d tried to trigger the launch of a global thermonuclear war:

First, I get a few seconds of this:
DiffLogViewer has encountered a user-defined breakpoint
Hey, Windows, I have an idea of how to solve the problem: launch a debugger!

But Windows has other ideas:

DiffLogViewer has stopped working

Luckily I noticed the previous ‘user defined breakpoint’ message, or at this point I’d have assumed that the program had just broken. Well, let’s click the ‘Debug’ button...

An unhandled exception ('Launch for user') occurred in DiffLogViewer

Woh – BIG dialog. Okay, let’s elevate the JIT debugger...

I can’t screengrab it, but now you must imagine the black curtain of death descending and an elevation prompt appearing.

FINALLY, we get the debugger launch prompt:

Visual Studio Just-In-Time Debugger

"Just-in-time" debugger? Too right it's 'just-in-time'. I was about to throw the computer out the window.

And, finally, just to put the icing on the cake, when VS finally gets hold of the process and goes to the appropriate stack frame, it presents me with this:

There is no source code available for the current location

Ironically, of course, once I’ve dismissed this dialog I can actually load symbols for mscorlib, and then I do have source code for the current location.

That’s FIVE clicks to get into the debugger... FIVE!

Plus all the time I’ve lost writing this! Damn you, Microsoft! Whatever happened to 'Developers! Developers! Developers!'?

posted @ Monday, February 11, 2008 4:45 PM | Feedback (0)