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NMath Visualizers

We’re happy to announce the availablility of NMath debugger visualizers, for examining NMath data types in debug mode. Currently supported types are:

CenterSpace.NMath.Core.FloatVector
CenterSpace.NMath.Core.DoubleVector
CenterSpace.NMath.Core.FloatMatrix
CenterSpace.NMath.Core.DoubleMatrix
CenterSpace.NMath.Stats.DataFrame

Installing the Visualizers

The NMath Visualizers will be included in forthcoming versions of the NMath libraries.

To install, place the DLL in either of the following locations:

  • <VS_installdir>/Common7/Packages/Debugger/Visualizers
  • My Documents/Visual Studio <version>/Visualizers

Visualizers put in the first location are available to all users on the machine; visualizers put in the second are available only to the the current user.

Starting a Visualizer

When debugging and at a breakpoint, hover your mouse over the supported NMath object you want to visualize. Click the little magnifying glass that appears in the datatip. You can also start a visualizer from the Locals view, as shown below:

Using a Visualizer

Numeric precision can be controlled using the listbox in the upper right. Row and column indices are shown at the left and top, respectively. Hovering over a cell displays a tooltip showing the cell indices.

When visualizing a DataFrame, the column names are displayed.

Known Issues

  1. With large vectors and matrices (tens of thousands of values) in Visual Studio 2005, we’ve seen the following error: “Function evaluation disabled because a previous function evaluation timed out. You must continue execution to reenable function evaluation.” We have not seen this problem in VS 2008.
  2. It is not possible to use the visualizers to debug a 64-bit application.

Ken

Update

Visualizers are now installed with NMath.

- Trevor

Update 2

Visualizers are now installed into the right Visual Studio directories with NMath 5.0 and NMath Stats 3.3.

- Trevor

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This entry was posted on Friday, February 6th, 2009 at 7:13 pm and is filed under NMath. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “NMath Visualizers”

  1. Ben Says:
    February 22nd, 2009 at 7:33 pm

    What is the issue with 64-Bit debugging?

  2. Trevor Says:
    March 2nd, 2009 at 4:16 pm

    We believe that 64-bit visualization is not possible. This is because Visual Studio runs as a 32-bit application even while debugging 64-bit applications. Therefore, our “plug-in” would need to be 32-bit yet need to handle a 64-bit matrix. We are still researching this issue.

  3. Trevor Misfeldt Says:
    February 16th, 2011 at 2:39 pm

    32-bit and 64-bit visualization are now possible with Visual Studio 2010.

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