DevTracer - The Trace Monitor for Software Developers and
Testers
DevTracer is a universal Trace Monitor, which can
be used with any development environment for Microsoft Windows® supporting .NET
or COM (Component Object Model).
The trace information, also called diagnostic output, is still available
with the compiled and deployed application. DevTracer is
independent of the IDE used by the developer.
- .NET (C#, VB.Net)
DevTracer uses a TraceListener. The TraceListener is supplied. It
can be used with desktop and web applications.
- Silverlight 2
Silverlight™ is still in beta. It is based on .NET. Although the .NET framework
for Silverlight does not have a TraceListener, DevTracer
is ready for Silverlight.
- C++ (MFC)
DevTracer can be used to capture the output of the TRACE(...)
macro.
- Scripting
DevTracer can be used with scripting languages like VBScript.
- Viusal Basic® 6 and Visual Basic for Applications
DevTracer replaces Debug.Print, making trace information
available after the application is compiled and deployed.
- Distributed applications
Monitor trace output of all components simultaneously.
Benefits and features
-
Client site debugging
Solve problems after the application has been deployed. Often a debugger is not available, and tracing is the only means of debugging.
- Can be used for any type of application
Create and collect trace output for desktop applications, distributed applications,
web applications, script, ...
- Unicode support
Necessary to develop international applications.
- Remote Monitoring
The Trace Monitor can can on any computer in your network, i.e. it can run on a
machine different from the one running the application monitored.
- .NET and COM
Can be used with .NET and COM (Microsoft Component Object Model) compatible applications.
- Application performance
Does not decrease the performance of the application significantly.
- No dependencies
Applications using DevTracer do not depend on
DevTracer, i.e. they will still run on machines without DevTracer
(or part of it) installed.
- Multiple application monitoring
Monitor several applications simultaneously. For example: if you develop an ASP.NET
application and a Web Service consumed by the ASP.NET application, both can be monitored
at the same time.
- Multi threaded applications
Monitor and debug multi threaded applications.
Who can use DevTracer?
Basically every software developer writing software for Microsoft Windows® can
use DevTracer. It does not depend on how you develop your
software. It can be used with all development tools targeting the Microsoft .NET
platform, and with all tools that support COM (Component Object Model).
DevTracer is also a great tool for testers. Whenever they
find a bug, they can use DevTracer to create some trace
information. This information they can send to the developer along with the bug
report, helping the developer to find the cause of the bug.
What is "tracing"?
Tracing is sometimes called creating diagnostic
output and is closely related to logging.
While logging is normally used to monitor the behavior
of an application after it has been deployed in a production environment,
tracing is used by software developers during development. It normally
displays more detailed information than logging.
Tracing is used to debug software, and to monitor it. Those
of you who already developed software for MS-DOS with C probably still remember
the function printf, which was the only way to debug
software (debuggers were rare during those days).
Nowadays debuggers are standard. But tracing is still extremely
useful. It provides a snapshot about the history of the current instance of the
application.
Testers normally do not use a debugger (it is not their job), but they can record
the trace to make it easier for developers to find the
cause of bugs, or other strange behavior.
Tracing is by no means a replacement for a debugger. It
complements debuggers. In some areas tracing is superior to using a debugger. Examples
are recursive programming and monitoring of SQL statements.