Work Plan

July, 2008: Study on the development of a debugging tool for the GLSL language, easing the development of shaders so developers will be able to use it efficiently and also benefit from its native interoperability characteristics.
August, 2008: Start of the development of the three initial modules of the debugging tool: 1) Step-by-step execution of the host OpenGL program; 2) GLSL shader editor; 3) GLSL shader compiler.
September, 2008: Release of the first, alpha version. The user will also be able to parse, step-by-step, the execution of the GLSL shader. At this time, this will only be done through a command line interface.
October, 2008: Validation tests and start the development of the graphical interface. This interface will allow the user the visualization of the OpenGL, GLSL calls and also the inspection of variable values and function parameters. In this stage, the tool will allow the debugging of vertex and fragment shaders.
November, 2008: Release of the first beta version. The user interface will allow the insertion of breakpoints both at the OpenGL host and at the GLSL shader execution, allowing the visualization of the results at execution time.
December, 2008: Release of the version 2.0, including community feedback. Writing of academic paper to be submitted to events.

January to April, 2009: Study of the Microsoft Visual Studio plugin structures in order to make the tool available inside the framework. Implementation and tests.

May, 2009: Release of the debugging tool as a Microsoft Visual Studio plugin.

June, 2009: Evaluation of feedbacks, correction of possible problems, write-up of a Hands-on-Lab on the usage of the tool. Proposal of next steps.