With IntelliTrace events and snapshots enabled in Tools>Options>IntelliTrace, every step (in, out, over) you take has a corresponding “step backwards” command to get back to the state of the app at a previous step. We first talked about this feature back in October for C# in this blog post and now we’re adding it for C++. Visual Studio works with the runtime and operating system to take snapshots of a running application’s stack, enabling you to hit a breakpoint and then to step backwards and forwards, with full access to the call stack, variables, and watch windows. Step back debugging is a type of historical debugging. Let’s look at a couple of the standout scenarios in this update that you can now try.

You can find the complete list of all the changes in the release notes and view the issues you submitted that are fixed on Developer Community. If you prefer to try these updates without installing, you can create a Visual Studio image on Azure. You can also download from to get the latest release of Visual Studio.

The easiest way to update is directly from within Visual Studio 2017 by selecting Help>Check for Updates or select “Update” from the Visual Studio Installer. Today, we are releasing Visual Studio 2017 version 15.9.

Visual studio community 2017