Search results matching tag 'IntelliTrace'

Collecting Module Specific Debugging Information using IntelliTrace

Abhijit Jana — Sat, 04 Jun 2011 05:00:00 GMT

I am sure by this time all of you already aware of what is IntelliTrace Debugging. Just to give a quick overview, IntelliTrace is a new features of Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate Edition. By default IntelliTrace is enabled . During debugging in Visual Studio, IntelliTrace works in the background and collect debugging information automatically and stored them in IntelliTrace Log File (. iTrace File ) . You can use the log file at any point of time to see what happened exactly at background during your live debugging. To know more details, you can see my several articles published on IntelliTrace and for step by step guide read “Debugging Application using IntelliTrace” from MSDN .

Using IntelliTrace you can capture module specific information. This is really helpful when you don’t want to debug certain modules during your debugging process. In this post I am going to discuss about how you can collect module specific information using IntelliTrace.

As I said, you can turn on or off module specific debugging collection using IntelliTrace. IntelliTrace settings allows you to specifically mention module names for which you want to capture debugging information or from which you don’t want. This is really useful because certain modules you might not be interesting for debugging purposes ( for example, you have some code previously which is working fine and you don’t want to test it ) .

How does it help ?

By avoiding unnecessary module you can only focus on the code on which you are interested to debugging.
It can improve the performance of debugging and loading debug information.
It will reduce the (.itrace ) log file size.

So, let have a look how things works. First you have to check the IntelliTrace Settings from Tools > Options > Intellitrace window. Select “Module” in IntelliTrace settings window.

In Module settings window you will find two option button

Collect data from all modules except for the following [ Selected By Default ]
Collect data from only the following modules

So when first option is selected , IntelliTrace will not capture the information for all the modules which are specified in the module selection area but in case of Option2, IntelliTrace will collect exact the different information ( Only specified module information will be captured ) .

Let’s consider, we have a simple web application where we have used some custom module ( Says MyClassLib.Dll ) to do some operation. To make it very simple, I wrote on Simple Add() method with in that and been called from the web application. Below is the code block for the class library.

Once the dll has been created, I have used the same in the web application .

Now, I called the Add() method on some button click event of my web application.

IntelliTrace Module setting says, we have selected the first option “Collect data from all modules except for the following”, which means, IntelliTrace can capture the information from my MyClassLib dll. Let’s Press F5 and run the web site and capture the IntelliTrace Debugging information

Well, as shown in above image IntelliTrace Capture the information of Button Click as well as the information from Add() Methods of MyClassLib. If you click on the navigator icon ( marked with red circle ) IntelliTrace windows, it will navigate you to the MyClassLib Code and show you the details of the add methods as shown in below image.

This is what, IntelliTrace capturing the information related the modules. Now, If You don’t wanted to capture the information of MyClass. Let’s go back to the IntelliTrace Settings, and tell IntelliTrace that don’t capture my Module Information.

Click on Add > Provide the string pattern match for the file name ( not Assembly name). Click on “Add” again.

You will get your module list named with other modules name for which you don’t want to capture the information.

Now if you run the application and try to capture the IntelliTrace event, you will find, though button click information has been captured there is no information captured for MyClassLib.dll and MyClass.cs .

Because we explicitly told IntelliTrace not to capture the information of the MyClassLib module.

To make it more clear, let me put the two different IntelliTrace window side by side. First IntelliTrace window says there are no debugging information captured for MyClassLib as we don’t have any further navigator indication where as second IntelliTrace windows saying something different, extra navigator indicates there are further information being captured for MyClassLib module.

Hope this gave you a clear idea how you can use the module capture information with IntelliTrace.

Module Information Capture will only work if you have select for capturing “Event and Call Information” from general settings of IntelliTrace Window. It won’t work for “Event Only Mode”.

For more info read

Hope this will help!

For any question or clarification drop me a message here, will answer as earliest.

Cheers !

Historical Debugging (Intellitrace) on Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate Part-2

Jalpesh07 — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 07:25:06 GMT

In the first post I have explained how historical debugging will going to work and how we can enable the historical debugging. In this blog post I am going to take one real time scenario and then we will see the How historical debugging will work. Here I have selected the second option for Intellitrace - Track event and call Information. I am going to check historical debugging with my asp.net application so following is a simple code for that.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Web;
using System.Web.UI;
using System.Web.UI.WebControls;

namespace Blogging
{
    public partial class _Default : System.Web.UI.Page
    {
        protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {
            Response.Write("This is a page load event");
            ThrowHistoricalException();
           
        }
        public void ThrowHistoricalException()
        {
            throw new Exception("Historical Deubgging");
        }

    }
}

In above code you can see its very simple We are printing one statement on in page load event with Response.Write and then it will call a new method called ThrowHistoricalDebugging. Where it will throw a new exception. Now all ready to check let press F5 to debug this thing. I have putted the break point over Response.Write statement so We can trace everything. so now debugging starts at my break point Just like below

Now let’ proceed the things further now lets step in with the pressing F10 It will call ThrowHistoricalException and Here you can see the exception like following.

As You can see now the Exception thrown. Now lets move to IntelliTrace window what’s are information there.

As you can see whole event and method trace information here in Intellitrace windows. Also you can see the A reviwnd Icon there so on clicking on that you can got the specific events and restart debugging. Now I have clicked on Page_load event and Now its going to the page_load event statement where the exception is thrown. Just like below.

Also you can see there button given to move updown and other stuff to move your current point up and down. I have click move up and You can see in below image its moving up.

That’s it. As you can see its very easy to move up down and go back to location of code wherever you want with historical debugging. So now you can easily see what happens when your tester is reproducing the bugs. Hope you like it. Stay tuned for more.. Happy Programming.

Historical Debugging (Intellitrace) on Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate Part-1

Jalpesh07 — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 20:22:26 GMT

Visual studio 2010 Ultimate comes with one of most interesting function Historical Debugging which will change the way you debug. Let’s see what is Historical Debugging and How its works.

How historical Debugging works?

As as developer you have already faced some situations like Your tester reports a bug and you are not able to reproduce that bug in your local environment or you have very long steps to reproduce it and sometimes it reproduces under special condition and some times it does not. At that time this historical features comes into existence. With Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate Microsoft has introduced a new debugging tool intellitrace. It keeps a trace of important points of your program and its allow you to go back at that time to see what happened at that time. Isn’t that cool? that is just like rewinding your recording to edit your video.

How we can enable Intellitrace on Visual Studio 2010 ?

To enable it you need to go to the Tool->Options->Intellitrace->General just like following.

There is a check box called ‘Enable Intellitrace’. You need to check that checkbox to enable IntelliTrace (Historical Debugging). There are two radio buttons

1) IntelliTrace Event Only- This option will enable historical debugging for the events only. So it will only keep track of events only. Not all the parts of code.

2) Intellitrace events and Call Information: This option will enable historical debugging for events and inner called like method and other stuff. It records method level call but due to that your application performance can be effected. You will not get high performance from your application.

There are some advance options are also given in the options dialog box like following when you click advance in above dialog.

Here you can specify the location of the IntelliTrace Recording and Maximum size of disk space for each recording.

In Intellitrace Events options you can specify which kind of events you want to trace. I have enabled it on ASP.NET Project so I have options for ASP.NET and ADO.NET Enabled by default like following. But You can select events like file,Environment events and lots of options are available so you can specify that as per your requirement like following.

In Modules options you can select for which system modules you want to enable intellitrace if You can also add your own modules here with string pattern like following.

So,Now we all set for the Historical debugging(IntelliTrace) in Next Post I will demonstrate how historical debugging will work. Hope you liked it.. Stay tuned for more..