At ICSE 2010, the Code Bubbles team from Brown University and the Code Canvas team from Microsoft Research presented similar ideas for new user experiences for an integrated development environment. Since then, the two teams formed a collaboration, along with the Microsoft Visual Studio team, to release Debugger Canvas, an industrial version of the Code Bubbles paradigm. With Debugger Canvas, a programmer debugs her code as a collection of code bubbles, annotated with call paths and variable values, on a twodimensional pan-and-zoom surface. In this experience report, we describe new user interface ideas, describe the rationale behind our design choices, evaluate the performance overhead of the new design, and provide user feedback based on lab participants, post-release usage data, and a user survey and interviews. We conclude that the code bubbles paradigm does scale to existing customer code bases, is best implemented as a mode in the existing user experience rather than a replacement, and is most useful when the user has a long or complex call paths, a large or unfamiliar code base, or complex control patterns, like factories or dynamic linking.

Could those ubiquitous hand-drawn code diagrams become a thing of the past? (NOTE: Also appears in ACM Queue 8:7, Aug 2010.)

The user interfaces of today’s development environments have a “bento box” design that partitions information into separate areas. This design makes it difficult to stay oriented in the open documents and to synthesize information shown in different areas. Code Canvas takes a new approach by providing an infinite zoomable surface for software develop-ment. A canvas both houses editable forms of all of a project’s documents and allows multiple layers of visualization over those documents. By uniting the content of a project and in-formation about it onto a single surface, Code Canvas is de-signed to leverage spatial memory to keep developers orient-ed and to make it easy to synthesize information.

Code Canvas is an experimental research platform for building a spatial development environment. It lets us explore design alternatives when dealing with source code on an infinitely scalable two-dimensional surface.