Xray debugger - a lifesaver

Finally there's a way to know what really happens inside your Flash movie. Flash 8 shipped with almost the same, bug-ridden debugger that was in MX04. Why Macromedia did not fix this is still a mystery to us, but here's a solution.

by Jens C. Brynildsen Yet another great project from OSFlash.org that is started by John Grden. Xray is a debugger that will tap into your Flash file, take a snapshot and let you inspect that. It runs as a separate application and utilize the LocalConnection to transfer information between the debugger and the file being debugged.

How many times have you not just sat there waiting for the Flash Debugger to catch up with all the stuff happening inside your script-intensive files? I'm pretty sure I use a full workday per year just waiting for the Flash Debugger. If you work on big Flash projects you'll know this already. If you have not, just drop a treeview component on stage, load it with 1000 nodes and you have almost enough time to grab coffee while the internal Flash Debugger loads up XML and draws movieclips on stage. That's how slow it is, but that's not the worst.

The internal Flash debugger will often not display what is actually happening in your file. That alone has cost me several days of work this past year. This is nothing new. We wrote about the problems back in 2003, but for some reason Macromedia are unable to fix the issues with the debugger.

As opposed to the built-in debugger, Xray does not update it's information every frame. It rather takes a snapshot of a object whenever you want to see what happens inside. This saves you from the tedious waiting. Some things can be inspected in realtime such as Netstreams and you can set and inspect most any property in the property inspector, but xray is much more extensive than the Flash Debugger. In Xray, you can inspect ANY kind of object (Functions, Netconnections, Dates, Video and more) and quickly drill down hierarchies and much more.

The Xray website also has a set of neat tutorial videos to get you started. Just download and install the MXP and xray debugger application and you're ready to debug. Drop the connector into your AS file, start up Xray and you'll never use the internal debugger again.


Click to download Xray or read more

 

 

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