[New Release] LiveRecorder 6.6

We’re pleased to announce our latest release, LiveRecorder 6.6, with the cheesy codename of Manchego.

We’ve been listening to you and working hard to deliver new features that will make finding and fixing code errors easier, faster, and more productive.

Here’s a changelog summary of what’s new.

Log Jump for Visual Studio Code

For Visual Studio (VS) Code users, we have an exciting new feature called Log Jump. The Log Jump feature provides a powerfully effective way for developers to jump from a line of interest in a log file, directly to the exact point in time in the program’s execution where it emitted that log line.

Log file information can provide indicators of when and why bugs cause software failures; but they often don’t contain enough detailed information on their own to make it possible to identify and fix complex or intermittent bugs.

Log Jump enables developers to leverage log file indicative information about software errors, and provides a recording that can then be used for instant root cause analysis and debugging.

By simply copying & pasting the timestamp of the log line of interest into our extension Time Travel Debug for VS Code, and pressing the “Goto” time button, UDB will jump directly to the corresponding moment in time in the recorded code. Then, by using Reverse Step Out, you are taken directly to the root cause of the issue.

The video below quickly demonstrates how this works:

Log files are the slow way to figure out what just happened but, combined with the power of a recording, developers using VS Code can now have all the software failure data they need to resolve failures faster than with any other method.

Visit Log Jump and click on the “Visual Studio Code” tab to learn more.

VS Code technical documentation improvements

To help developers understand the nuts and bolts of how to get the most out of UDB via our Time Travel Debug extension in VS Code, we’ve expanded and improved the technical documentation available. Click on the “Visual Studio Code” tab on many of the UDB documentation pages to see the VS Code specific content.

Parallel Search

Parallel Search is a performance-enhancement option that makes use of multi-core systems to speed up the performance of reverse navigation commands.

We’ll soon be writing separately about Parallel Search and its benefits, as it’s such a significant development.

For full technical information about our 6.6 Manchego release, take a look at our technical documentation.

Reverse Step commands stop at breakpoints

When used, the Reverse Step command (including reverse-step, reverse-next and the corresponding Reverse Step Into and Reverse Step Out buttons in Visual Studio Code) in UDB will now stop the program’s execution if the program hits a breakpoint or watchpoint.

This improvement brings the behavior of reverse operations into line and is consistent with forward time travel commands.

Stepi and reverse-stepi operations remain in the same thread

The stepi and reverse-stepi commands now step one instruction forwards or backwards within the current thread.

You can also use reverse-stepi -any-thread to step back exactly one instruction back in history, potentially switching threads in the process. Again, this improvement provides consistent behavior between stepi / reverse-stepi and other time travel commands.

Improvements to the bookmarks feature in UDB CLI

A bookmark can be used to name a point in time of interest in a program’s execution history. Developers are then able to jump to the bookmarked time from any later point in a debugging session. Bookmarks are really useful, as long as you don’t create too many and litter them around your code.

We’ve improved this feature to make it as easy to delete bookmarks as it is to create them.

As always, we’d like to thank our phenomenal engineering team for producing a great release. To review the full release notes, visit https://docs.undo.io.

Please ask any of your remaining questions or share your experiences with us on LinkedIn, Twitter, or our Community forums!

Manchego 🧀

We ❤️ cheese, so we name all of our releases after some of them. To find out more about Manchego cheese, the inspiration for this release, there’s information on Wikipedia.