New version of Mole 2010 available

Molosoft has been hard at work. We incorporated some customer feedback into Mole 2010, added a killer new feature for WPF and Windows Forms developers, and fixed a few minor issues. Read more about it and download the Mole 2010 v1.2 installer here.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 3rd, 2011 at 12:46 pm and is filed under Mole 2010. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

4 Responses to New version of Mole 2010 available

  1. Joe White says:
    April 3, 2011 at 8:47 pm

    The feature sounds intriguing, but you really don’t give any information about it. What happens when you invoke it? You have one screenshot, which doesn’t really tell me much. How easy is it to get to? I can’t tell.

    Since Mole is a debugger visualizer, would I have to stop on a breakpoint in the debugger, find some expression that evaluates to a WPF element, hover over it, click the magnifying-glass dropdown, select “Mole 2010”, and then finally end up with a window with an “Inspect” button in it somewhere? (And the button is grayed out in your screenshot, so presumably I would then also have to figure out how to get it enabled.)

    Or is it more complicated than that? You mention it being a feature of the “Snapshot Inspector”, so does that mean I would have to use the “save snapshot to disk” feature you’ve talked about before (and try to come up with a reasonable filename for the snapshot) before I could get to this button? And how many tooltips and dialogs do I have to click through before I can save a snapshot?

    If this was as simple as clicking a toolbar button or menu item in Visual Studio, dragging the mouse over a WinForms control or WPF element in a running application (ideally one not even being debugged), and immediately seeing the Name and type of the element under the cursor, the type of its enclosing UserControl / Page / Form / Window descendant, and (in WPF) the class name of the element’s DataContext, with the ability to copy any of those things to the clipboard, that right there would be worth the price of admission. (Snoop can do something similar, but not for WinForms, and it’s clumsy to use.) From your write-up so far, I have no clear concept of whether this feature can do anything of the sort, or how much work it takes to get there.

  2. Josh Smith says:
    April 3, 2011 at 9:31 pm

    Joe,

    You are correct that you’d need to be at a breakpoint in order to use that feature of Mole 2010. Mole only exists while you’re at a breakpoint, so it does not have live, runtime UI inspection like Snoop. They are very different tools in that sense.

    To use the Snapshot Inspector while working in Mole, you simply click down on the Inspector button in the Snapshot pane’s toolbar. Keep the left mouse button down and drag the mouse cursor over the snapshot image and it performs “hit testing” of the UI represented by the snapshot image. Let go of the mouse cursor when it’s over the element you want to inspect in the MoloScope.

    If you would like to try Mole 2010 out for free, we offer a demo version here http://www.molosoft.com/demo

    Thanks,
    Josh

  3. Joe White says:
    April 4, 2011 at 11:42 am

    Is the snapshot pane a dockable window in the IDE? Or is it something deep inside the debugger visualizer?

  4. Josh Smith says:
    April 4, 2011 at 11:58 am

    Joe, all features in Mole exist in the visualizer UI. The Snapshot Inspector is available by clicking a button in the toolbar of the Snapshot pane in the Mole 2010 visualizer.

    Trying the free trial would clarify what Mole 2010 is and is not.

    Thanks,
    Josh

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