Overall 2.1 Plan

Overall Themes for Platform Debug:

• robust and enhance
• reduce gestures, improve usability
• write articles

item is deferred

item is under development

item is finished

Planned Items

Architectural issues

• synchronization/serialization of runnables
• "plural" listener interfaces for breakpoints, launches, and expressions
• vulnerability to runtime exceptions in extension points and listeners
• incorporate step debug into debug core interfaces

Performance

• memory leak pass

Actions

• Workbench key binding support

Launch configurations

• convenience action to open launch config dilaog from history menu (perhaps CTRL-click)
• dialog to support editing of single launch configuration
• support for launch configuration categories
• support for launch configuration groups

Variables

• support for multi-select details (i.e. details of more than one variable)
• support for wrapped details area rather than horizontal scrolling
• support for font selection in the details area
• migrate detail area location setting to view menu (as in type hierachy view)
• variables remain expanded on stack frame browsing
• variables remain expanded on iterative suspend/resume/suspend

Presentation

• show sticky instruction pointers (via markers or highlighting), in all visible stack frames

Console

• investigate extensible "open" menu actions - eg. "Open on Type".[This is to be replaced with domain specific hyperlinks, implemented with the following "line tracker" extension point].
• line tracker extension point - extensions are notified when lines are added to the console for a specific process type. Extension may process output and add hyperlinks as required.
• support for showing the output of a specific process without debug view interaction

Breakpoints

• use platform support for selective persistence of breakpoints

Source lookup

• "Source not found" editor - opened when source is not located for the selected stack frame

Articles

• We Have Liftoff: The Launching Framework in Eclipse

Deferred Items (Post 2.1)

Launch Configurations

• import/export
• support location history in common tab
• define common (optional) launch config attributes - such as project
• support for working sets in launch dialog (was experimented with, but was removed)

Source Lookup

• Migrate local file storage & zip storage to the platform

Actions

• Investigate set of retargetable actions - add/remove breakpoint, run to line, etc. [Discovered the workbench does not support contribution of target actions for retargettable actions].
• Improve start-up performance of contributed toggle actions in debug views (lazy activation)

Console

• Generic extension point for regular expression matching in console output, with marker creation and lifecycle

Presentation

• investigate scalibility issues - views, actions, menus for many debug models

2.1 Development Effort - Milestone 5 (February 7th, 2003)

Console

• Support for showing the output of a specific process with drop-down menu

Architecture

• Protect againt exceptions in listener lists and extension points

Actions

• Workbench key binding support
• Improve start-up performance of contributed toggle actions in debug views (lazy activation)
• Support for new "step debug" interface/action

Variables

• Support for wrappered details area
• Support for font selection in the details area

Launch Configurations

• Remove support for working set filters in launch dialog
• Support for editing & launching a single configuration from the dialog (for external tools/ant)

Fixing defects

Bug Resolution

• Fixes released in 2.1