I’ve had a super quick tour of Visual Studio 2015 Community Edition and I have to say I’m pretty impressed as it stands. I’m currently downloading Unity 5 and will be installing the latest toolkits shortly that go hand in hand with this.
In the meantime, I’ve been looking at some of the new debugging performance aids; namely, PerfTips.
Full information can be found here:
In the example screenshot below I have rigged some methods (using the new async syntax in a rough and ready way) to simulate a slight delay in the retrieval of information. I’ve placed breakpoints in the code and you can see that, when hit, a small diagnostic message is shown in the editor detailing the time, in milliseconds, that have elapsed during the previous method call. Very, very nice:
You will also notice that some extra diagnostics, listing the events that have occurred so far and interesting metrics such as memory usage, are being shown in the Diagnostic Tools window on the far right. This is something I’ll have a further dig into; looks interesting on first glance.
The only thing I didn’t like off the bat was the default colour of the PerfTip text itself (which is non-descript when not highlighted, as standard). I have a penchant for the Visual Studio Dark theme so I prefer colours to pop a little more, just personal taste really. Thankfully, this can be easily rectified by navigating to Tools > Options > Environment > Fonts and ‘Colours’ (sorry, I’m British, I can’t help myself!) as shown here:
From here, you can adjust the Item foreground value (ensuring that PerfTips is selected from the Show Settings for drop down and that Text is highlighted in the Display items selection box). Of course, you’re also free to set the colour of the PerfTip text when highlighted as well by selecting the Highlighted Text item from the Display Items selection box and adjusting the Item foreground to the desired colour. If the colours on offer don’t float your boat then the usual custom colour picker is present also.
You can fly by this handy, dandy post for more details:
The end result (depending on the colour you pick) is as follows:
I did receive a message stating that the application may need a restart for changes to take hold. In this case, I got away with it and the change kicked in immediately.
Anyway, just a short post for tonight. I will detail any other interesting finds as they crop up.
Until the next time!
bearandhammer 