Coming Soon : Railtown in Visual Studio

We’ve been working hard this winter to make railtown.ai even more useful during your development cycles.

Railtown.ai reports on errors that happen in all your environments - including local development. This can help prevent bugs from ever making their way onto live environments. Even if you don’t catch the error right away, knowing that it has happened in a local environment is an invaluable piece of information when that same error shows up in a test or production environment. We’ve already seen the value in this ourselves, while we were using railtown.ai to build railtown.ai.

With our Slack and Microsoft Teams integrations, you can set things up so your team is notified of all local errors. But what if you could find out about them without ever leaving the comfort of your IDE?

To make this happen, we set about building a new Visual Studio extension, so you can see what railtown.ai knows about your code while browsing the source code of your project.

You can create all sorts of extensions to Visual Studio using the VSSDK. For our purposes we decided to place a glyph in what Visual Studio calls the ‘indicator margin’ - the left side of the editor, where you click if you want to create a breakpoint.

Our AI analyses stack traces and determines the entry point for all the errors we receive from your application. That means we can put a nice glyph (in railtown.ai purple) at the start of the method to let you know we’ve detected an error in that method. We’ll also tell you if the error was observed in multiple environments: local or live. Railtown.ai has no access to your actual source code, so it works this out based on the stack traces you’ve sent us

As you can see, with this extension you’ll be able to see if a certain entry point has been causing errors. It can even give you an early warning about errors that are being generated in local environments at that very moment, so you can help fix bugs before the offending code has even been committed!

Please contact us if you’d be interested in trying a beta version of this extension. 

If you don’t already have a railtown.ai account sign up and let us help you improve the quality of your software and increase your developer velocity.