The Future of Visual Studio: Interactive Expert Panel | Debugging and Performance

Visual Studio is like the king of debugging for me and it's like the greatest debugging experience ever. I I use everything. I use Rider, Code, Sublime when I want to just code. But the debugging experience is why I keep going back to Visual Studio. It's like the best. 2026 is even faster, snappier, better. I'm just wondering like is that still a top priority for you guys? >> Yes. That was an easy answer. >> So the debugger has spent a lot of time focusing on performance. Like uh optimizing both the F5 launch scenario as well as like when you hit breakpoint and stuff like that. Cuz obviously the how do you say debugging can be quite invasive to applications. Like obviously you've got to bind breakpoints, right? So you're going to pause execution, load symbols, stuff like that. So they've done some work in performance. Also not so much for .NET developers, but a big area of investment have been around for games developers. Like one of the big challenge for games developers is the inner loop's quite painful. Like deploying and building a modern game is a real pain. And then often you can't run debug builds because they wouldn't meet any sort of performance criteria, right? So you have to build retail. As everyone knows, debugging retail is a nightmare, right? So one of the things that the debugging team is focused on is enabling things like hot swapping of debug binaries. So you can essentially, you know, do editing to your patching into your depending on your perspective where you can build a debug module as DLL and debug that. So it's really almost get debug like experience debug build like experiences on a retail. Which like for games developers is really, you know, really really shrinks that inner loop time from something that is completely untenable to something that actually makes it much like you would have as a web developer. Not quite obviously, it's still C++ and you've got to compile. Um but uh much better. So there's a lot of focus on performance. And there's even over time we continue to add features like you've seen the like on editor adorners, things like that. And clearly they're investing a lot in the debugger agent, which is around helping, you know, people debug exceptions and stuff, right? Uh which could be really good for, you know, you should try it. Like it's got both the capabilities of using the VS debugger cuz another thing on the debugger side that we've been working on is exposing the capabilities to the agent to the LLM so they can you know interrogate call stacks and variables and stuff like that, understand state. Because you know why I think one of the advantages that VS definitely has, like you said, is the debugger, is that runtime information, which is difficult to get when looking at just code, right? Like some bugs you literally could never debug just by looking at the code. And so being able to access that runtime state is also super powerful. >> Yeah, I think one of the things that is uh I don't know if it's ironic or just uh like the debugger is incredibly powerful, the profiler is incredibly powerful. These are like actually hugely mainstays of a Visual Studio. And as you say, right, like they are they are the the top tier, right? Um the number of developers that know the capabilities of the debugger um and the profiler uh to their full extent is pretty limited. And so like one of the things opportunities that we see is like where can we make it easier to learn and interact and discover uh things that the debugger and the profiler can do that you otherwise uh and not you, but you probably know them. Uh but like uh you know, many Visual Studio users have just never find, right? Nah, fair. Yep. >> More of a comment. I don't know if it's been mentioned, but there's actually a debugger agent. I don't know if you know about that. Yeah, it's Yeah, it's kind of hard to find, but it's like an at debugger. Uh and it's uh pretty impressive. I've been playing with it recently. Uh so >> Yeah. >> You mentioned dotPeek. Like one of the areas that not recently, but we have been previewing is decompilation. So there's a whole bunch of like decompile with symbols type stuff that like what In that scenario, actually VS is also going a slightly different path. Like on some products like dot P you often have to compile how do you say it won't do jitted code. Like you won't be able to debug jitted code. So most of the decompilation things that comes to the debug time turn off j optimizations on when you run your application. But recently yeah the last on that release we shipped a feature for the debugger where you can debug jitted code. So you could again keep the idea of like this is the code as it would perform in real life rather than do things like you know suppress exception what suppress jitting. So there are continuing investments even in the decompiler which is a niche topic. Like how many people here end up using things like dot P yet the jetbrains.net product decompile assemblies. You can right click generate PDBs for modules for example. Got a few people. See great that we continue to invest in improving those things. But like I was saying one of the fantastic things especially for profiling is asking copilot just just try it. You've got literally nothing to lose and a lot of times it will find things that you know we're taking new things that you wouldn't have even looked for. We do it when we go to lunch right the profiler team? Oh yeah. They put the profiler onto Visual Studio itself and goes for lunch and when they come back they see what the profiler found and sometimes it found something valuable and sometimes it didn't and it's okay. Um but it makes it's you know no one got fired from improving the performance of their application right? So it's like one of those free things you can do that may have a real impact. So it's really cool. And this is stuff that I'm not very low level. I don't know how to do a bunch of stuff that's low level right? And and I'm sure a lot of you do. But there's we always have our own limitations and what's really cool about the profiler is that it can usually go all the way to the metal and you will be able to learn things about your app and your runtime and all that type of stuff that you otherwise wouldn't know and therefore you wouldn't have been able to find any perf optimization opportunities. So the the profiler agent is fantastic.