Mole

Debugging applications can be very difficult. Using the standard debugging tools in Visual Studio is like having tunnel vision; you can see one leaf on a tree but not the entire forest. If you find yourself wishing for a better way to debug applications, look no further. Download Mole for Visual Studio for free and a new world of relevant information will be available to you.

Visit the Mole home page on Karl Shifflett’s blog here.

Read the CodeProject article about Mole here.

Watch the tutorial videos that show how to use Mole here.

Listen to the Polymorphic Podcast episode about Mole here.

The creation of Mole for Visual Studio was a collaborative effort between three .NET programming fanatics; jokingly referred to as Team Mole. Here is a quick review of Team Mole:

Karl Shifflett (a.k.a. The Molenator)

Karl was the captain of this crazy adventure. He was cranking out new features while integrating code that Andrew and I sent him via e-mail. Karl came up with tons of great ideas and just implemented them on the spot. He invented the amazing “Max-O-Drilling” data drilling feature, which makes Mole so powerful. Karl kept the torch burning and kept improving Mole day after day, week after week.

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Andrew Smith (a.k.a. The Sniper)

Andrew joined the Mole project shortly after v1 was released. He earned the title “The Sniper” because of his mind-blowing ability to kill the really nasty bugs and then disappear into the thickets until needed again. A large amount of Mole’s editing capabilities was implemented by The Sniper. He contributed an endless stream of great suggestions, feature requests, bug fixes, and encouragement. Due to some of Andrew’s sage advice, Mole is about twice as fast as it would have been otherwise.

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Josh Smith (a.k.a. Rock Star)

I built the original visualizer which got this whole initiative underway, Woodstock for WPF. Shortly after I released Woodstock, Karl mentioned that he was using it as a prototype for his own visualizer, Mole, so we joined forces to make Mole. Back then our visualizers only targeted WPF applications, but eventually we made it work for any type of .NET application.

I helped write the core Mole application, researched how to use the visualizer technology efficiently, designed the recursive algorithms for working with large hierarchical data structures, researched and built the logical tree functionality (for WPF apps only), and did endless testing, tweaking, and prodding to make Mole lightning fast. I’m not sure why, but I’ve been dubbed “Rock Star.” Oh well, I can think of worse nicknames!

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Enjoy Mole and have a great day!