An informal introduction

I’m Matthew Saffer, a Software Development Engineer on the IntelliTrace team. I will use this blog to aid in understanding IntelliTrace and how it can help you through every step of your products’ lifecycle.

Here’s a little background on me:

Who is this guy?

I grew up in New Jersey (Only the strong survive there!)

I went to Carnegie-Mellon University for my BS in Computer Science

I have been, and continue to be an avid cyclist, but only when the sun is out J

I enjoy working with all sorts of technology, but mostly software: arduinos, creating programming languages, web technologies and networking are currently piquing my interest.

What do you do?

After working with a web startup, and interning with Sony's Tools and Technology Group, I interned on the IntelliTrace team, and had such a great experience that I came back and have been working with IntelliTrace for the last 2+ years.

I work on a few different parts of the IntelliTrace end-to-end scenarios:

1) I am responsible for the IntelliTrace Events implementation in the IntelliTrace .NET profiler (including the IL Interpreter that IntelliTrace uses to speculatively execute methods and properties.)

2) The Microsoft Test Manager / IntelliTrace integration is owned by me.

3) All of the IIS and IntelliTrace interactions are owned by me as well (this stuff is tricky!)

4) I have aided in the creation and maintenance of IntelliTrace’s serialization mechanisms.

 So to sum it up, I’m a low-level plumbing type of guy.

In the coming posts I will explain what kind of challenges these features presented, and the neat uses and options you can tweak.

What’s this IntelliTrace thing?

My colleague Ian Huff has a great introduction about IntelliTrace. If you are not inclined to read his description here’s a short one I whipped up:

IntelliTrace is a diagnostics tool for assessing program flow and tracing specific events throughout a programs’ execution, it aims to reduce the Mean Time to Bug Discovery (MTBD).

How do I get IntelliTrace?

IntelliTrace is included in the Visual Studio Ultimate SKU, the ability to collect IntelliTrace logs is also provided in the Test Elements SKU

So how do I use this thing?

You can use IntelliTrace through Visual Studio directly, or via the command line. These will be subjects of my upcoming posts!