A few years ago, some friends and I released Mole for Visual Studio 2008. Mole is a debugger visualizer that runs in Visual Studio while you are debugging .NET applications. Our goal was to make debugging easier, which Mole accomplishes because it provides a comprehensive view into all of your application’s data objects. Although the tool was created as a pet project to help us with our own work, it became quite popular, and has been downloaded more than 100,000 times (that we know about).
When Visual Studio 2010 was released, we had to make a decision. Either we could just upgrade the old Mole so that it works in Visual Studio 2010 (which some people have already done), or we could take the plunge and make Mole all that we knew it could be. We decided to take the plunge…
After a year of dedication and hard work, we are thrilled to announce that our new version of Mole is now available! Mole 2010 is the next generation of the Mole debugger visualizer, built to work in Visual Studio 2010. The new version of Mole makes the previous one look like a half-baked prototype.
Mole 2010 has many useful new features, bug fixes, and performance optimizations. Not only is it a more powerful tool, but it also looks much better and is easier to use. We rewrote the entire user interface in WPF, and even brought a professional Visual Designer onto the team to make sure that Mole looks as great as it works.
Our hard work resulted in a useful, powerful, and elegant debugging tool. We are extremely proud of Mole 2010.
We are selling Mole 2010 for $49.99 from our company Web site: www.molosoft.com
A free demo version of Mole 2010 is available here.
If you are a .NET developer using Visual Studio 2010, check it out!
Josh Smith on WPF 
Does it work well with Silverlight debugging?
Hi Rex,
Unfortunately Visual Studio 2010 does not support custom debugger visualizers for Silverlight. So, no, Mole 2010 cannot work with Silverlight. We hope that the next version of VS will support Mole for Silverlight.
Thanks,
Josh
why it’s not free ? 😦
@Julian: Why would you expect the tool to be free? Did you see the part about him developing it for a year? If you’re doing a lot of hardcore debugging I doubt that $50 is much of an issue.
Josh, Looks like a great tool. I went to purchase it, but didn’t when I saw the license. Let me know if you decide to change to a developer friendly license that monitors installs for abuse, but doesn’t arbitrarily limit them.
This is great! I have been using Mole 2008 for a long time now and have been very happy.
I didn’t see a place on the mole site to ask questions or place comments (besides the contact page), but any indication if updates to Mole 2010 will be free?
Also, I agree with Alan, the license limit of 3 activations is not best suited for an enviornment like myself where I re-image computers for our dev machines frequently …
Matt,
Updates to Mole 2010 will be free for existing customers. Sorry if you don’t like the activation model. We are looking into other options.
Thanks,
Josh
Hi Josh,
Can you comment on the reason why there isn’t an evaluation version? Is it a limitation with your current activation model? Or perhaps you include source or else there’s a concern that it would be easy to defeat the licensing using tools like Reflector (or even because there’s a feeling that the demo videos “should be good enough”)?
I have no doubt the tool is worth the money and I’m sure I’ll be buying it…just seems like a curious oversight to not have come right out and addressed this.
Cheers and keep up the great work,
-Brian
Brian,
We plan on making an evaluation version available soon. It is something that we knew people would want, but planned on taking care of shortly after the release. Thanks for your interest in Mole!
Josh
Just bought Mole 2010 and gave it a test run. Must say, impressed. Used to use Mole in VS ’08. The new one is alot better. Like you said in your blog post here, makes the oldie look like a prototype.
I think you are undercharging, myself. But that’s just me, so grain of salt and all that. Good luck with it.
Thanks for the kind words, Chopps. I’m really glad you are impressed by Mole 2010. We spent hundreds (thousands?) of hours making the tool as good as we knew how. I’m glad it paid off.
Regarding the price, that’s a tough one. We debated internally on the price for quite some time. Eventually settled on $49.99 but it’s really subjective. I’ve already had several people complain it’s too expensive. In my mind, four people spending a year of their free time working on something that helps people do their jobs is worth at least fifty bucks. Then again, I am one of the people who slaved away on it for hundreds of hours, so my view is definitely biased. 🙂
Josh
Biased, yes. Wrong, no.
I’m intrigued, but not having used Mole before I’m going to wait for the trial version. Please post again when it’s ready!
It is only 50 bucks!
Compared to your other tools this is soooo inexpensive…..
Congrats, Josh, on releasing this tool.
I used Moles several years back when it was in its infancy. I’d like to try it before buying it. I’ll check back in a few weeks.
Hey Judah,
We just released a free demo of Mole 2010! Check it out here… http://www.molosoft.com/demo/
Thanks,
Josh