Parallel Stacks – Method View

Sat, June 6, 2009, 03:24 PM under ParallelComputing
This post was UPDATED for the VS2010 Beta 2 release

The new Parallel Stacks window has a special feature (that applies to both Threads View and Tasks View) that we call Method View. It is accessible from the toolbar and it acts on the current stack frame (i.e. the only one with a green arrow icon or, in the absence of that, the one with the yellow arrow). It takes that method and pivots the diagram on it, coalescing all occurrences of that method into a single node in the center, clearly showing the callees and the callers. Threads that do not have that method on their stack are filtered out and not shown. Check out the before and after screenshots:

Switching to another stack frame in Method View will result in that method context becoming the "center of attention", and hence potentially some threads will disappear and others will re-appear on the diagram. The view persists cross debugging sessions (just like all the other options) and to get out of it you simply need to click on the Method View toolbar button again and return to Stack View.