Changes to how we display data

By Stephen Kellett
12 June, 2020

We’ve changed the display of data on all of our tree controls that are used to display callstacks and call trees.

The old method of display, everything was displayed in black text at normal font weight.

The new method of display, different components of the text are displayed in their own colour, with optional bold, italic, underline or strikethrough, with an optional change in font face. In practice, at present we’re only changing the display colour and turning bold on/off.

We’re using this new display technology to leave some items neutral, emphasise some items and de-emphasise other items. This change has made quite a difference in readability of the display. Right now there is no ability for the user of the software to edit these settings to change the prioritisation and colour scheme we’ve chosen. We’ll provide this capability in a future release.

I’m going to show some before and after images so that you can see the difference for each tool.

C++ Memory Validator

For C++ Memory Validator, we’ve changed both function and filename to be displayed in bold. Type, thread name, timestamp, module name, and symbol name are displayed in different colours. Address is displayed in a de-emphasised colour.

Before
Memory Validator memory

After
Memory Validator memory with colour

Before
Memory Validator hotspot

After
Memory Validator hotspot with colour

.Net Memory Validator

For .Net Memory Validator, we’ve changed both function and filename to be displayed in bold. Age, Generation, thread name, timestamp, module name, and symbol name are displayed in different colours. Address is displayed in a de-emphasised colour.

Before
.Net memory heap dump

After
.Net memory heap dump with colour

Before
.Net memory snapshot

After
.Net memory snapshot with colour

Thread Validator

For Thread Validator, we’ve changed both function and filename to be displayed in bold. Thread name, timestamp, module name, and symbol name are displayed in different colours.

Before
Thread Validator active objects

After
Thread Validator active objects with colour

Before
Thread Validator locks

After
Thread Validator locks with colour

Performance Validator

For Performance Validator, we’ve changed both function and filename to be displayed in bold. Module name, and symbol name are displayed in different colours.

Before
Performance Validator call tree

After
Performance Validator call tree with colour

Coverage Validator

For Coverage Validator, the branches, files and directory displays have had a few tweaks to de-emphasis address information.

Before
Coverage Validator

After
Coverage Validator with colour

Bug Validator

For Bug Validator, we’ve re-ordered the display information so that the symbol comes before the filename. Both function and filename are displayed in bold. Timestamp, thread name, module name, and symbol name are displayed in different colours.

Before
Bug Validator

After
Bug Validator with colour

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