ease debugging: name your threads

hi there,

Whenever I'm debugging multithreaded Ax batch processes via CIL in Visual Studio, I tend to lose the overview of which thread I'm in and what data it actually is processing.

A tip that might help you out is the threads window. You can pull this up in Visual Studio via the the menu: Debug > Windows > Threads. Apparently this option is only available (and visible) while you're actually debugging, so make sure you have an ax32serv.exe process attached to Visual Studio.
That would give you something like this:

Now at least you have an indication (the yellow arrow) which thread you're currently in.

From this point on you get a few options that might come in handy some day:
- Instead of having all threads running, you can focus on one specific thread and freeze the other threads. Just select all the thread you'd like to freeze, and pick 'freeze' from the context menu:

- Once you know which data a specific thread is handling, you may want to give your thread a meaningful name that makes it easier for you to continue debugging: just right-click the thread you want to name and pick the 'rename' option.

The result could then be:

You could take it a step further (or back if you wish) and name your thread at runtime from in X++. If you'd add code like in the example below, you'd see the named thread when debugging CIL in Visual Studio.

The drawback (I found pretty quick) is that at thread can be named only once at runtime. Once a thread is named, you cannot call myThread.set_Name() again (you'd run into an exception). And if you know thread are recycled, the runtime naming of a thread loses most of it's added value in my opinion. The workaround is to rename it during debugging, which then again is possible.

There is probably lots and lots more to say about debugging threaded processes in Visual Studio, the above are the tips & tricks I found the most useful.

Enjoy!