Introducing IntelliTrace
In the upcoming release of Visual Studio 2010 we’re going to be rolling out a very cool new feature called IntelliTrace to enhance and expand the Visual Studio debugger experience. In a nutshell, IntelliTrace is a black box for your debugging experience. As your programs run IntelliTrace can be running as well, collecting lots of debugging data at various checkpoints and saving it off either to browse back to during debugging or to reopen on another machine to examine at a later time. This tool gives developers more control and information during their local debugging runs as well as providing an excellent way for testers to provide much better repro information along with their bugs, as they can use IntelliTrace to attach a log of debugging data leading up to a test failure that a developer can then open later for analysis.
That is the gist of IntelliTrace, but for a more fully featured introduction I can recommend either my take, John Robbins’ Blog or the MSDN documents on the subject. Since IntelliTrace and debugging features go hand in hand (we’re all part of one big team here along with the Profiler) I’ll keep up with some rollup posts on IntelliTrace from time to time here on the debugger blog. Below I’ve linked in some of my most recent post with general information about IntelliTrace, information on the IntelliTrace log files (.iTrace) and the integration of IntelliTrace with the new Microsoft Test Manager. If you have any feedback or questions on IntelliTrace please feel free to drop me a line at my blog and I’ll do my best to answer.
[Ian Huff]