Sapphire In Steel

We’ve made much better progress than we’d anticipated with the Ruby debugger for Visual Studio. Initially we had planned the debugger in 0.6 release of Ruby In Steel to take the form of breakpoints plus a ‘code evaluation’ window. In fact, we have come much further than that. It will now include the following features:

• breakpoints
• locals  window
• drag-and-drop watch variables
• call stack
• tracing with step into / step over
• interactive debugging console

This is still some way short of the complete debugging which we have planned. For example, the 0.6 release won’t have conditional breakpoints, ‘drilling down’ into variables or the ability to change the values of variables while debugging; we’ll be adding these features in a later version. Let’s take a quick run through the features it will have…

Breakpoints

Steel lets you add breakpoints to your Ruby programs by clicking in the margin of selected code lines. You can selectively enable/disable selected (or all) breakpoints in this breakpoints window.

Locals

The Locals window automatically monitors and displays the values of local variables

Watch

You can enter the names of variables (or drag and drop variables from the editor window) in the Watch pane

Call Stack

When your code is running several methods deep you can see this instantly in the Call Stack pane

Debug Console

The interactive console not only display the output from the program you are debugging; it also lets you evaluate expressions – for example, enter the name of an object to inspect it or call a specific method to see the return value.

Beta version 0.6 of Ruby In Steel will be available for download from this site by the end of May.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 8th, 2006 at 12:48 pm and is filed under ruby, steel, programming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.