Historical debugging with intelli trace in visual studio 2017

1. saturday 2017
HISTORICAL DEBUGGING WITH
INTELLITRACE IN VISUAL STUDIO
Mirco Vanini

2. AGENDA
Debugging with and without IntelliTrace
What is IntelliTrace ? (and what it can do for you)
Why debug with IntelliTrace?
Debugging with IntelliTrace deep dive

3. BE MORE PRODUCTIVE DURING
YOUR DAILY DEBUGGING
You are asked to fix a bug:
- for a part of the app you didn’t write
- OR that takes a lot of steps/time to reproduce
- OR after joining a new team or project
- OR for an application you wrote a while ago
- OR that is not easy to reproduce on a dev machine
- OR that you don’t know exactly how to reproduce
OR you simply notice unexpected behavior

4. DEBUGGING WITH AND
WITHOUT INTELLITRACE
DEMO

5. WHAT IS INTELLITRACE ?
IntelliTrace is a Visual Studio Ultimate feature that improves
developer productivity during debugging
“Historical Debugging”
Tracks events and method call information at runtime
Records stack trace, local variables, and custom information for
each event

6. VS2017 SUPPORTS

7. WHAT CAN INTELLITRACE DO?
Application is running
Debugging
started
File Access: Reading
config files
Gesture: Button
“Open” clicked
ADO.NET: “SELECT *
FROM Customer” was
executed
Exception: Exception
“ArgumentNullException”
was thrown

8. HOW INTELLITRACE SAVES ME
DEBUGGING TIME
Typically, without IntelliTrace:
­ First thought is “where to place a breakpoint?”
­ Repeat testing steps with every failed attempt
­ Keep setting breakpoints to find root cause
With IntelliTrace:
­ First thought is “what has IntelliTrace collected?”
­ Identify root cause immediately or at least eliminate
potential scenarios
­ Overall less time spent investigating

9. WHAT APPS CAN I DEBUG WITH
INTELLITRACE?
Supported
Visual Basic and Visual C# applications that use .NET Framework 2.0 or higher versions.
You can debug most applications, including ASP.NET, Microsoft Azure, Windows Forms,
WCF, WPF, Windows Workflow, SharePoint 2010, SharePoint 2013, and 64-bit apps
Limited support
F# apps on an experimental basis; Windows Store apps supported for events only, call
information is not currently available for .NET Core apps
Not supported
C/C++, script languages; Windows Services, Silverlight, Xbox, or Windows Mobile apps.

10. INTELLITRACE EXPERIENCES
Traditional or live debugging shows only your application's current state, with
limited data about past events
IntelliTrace expands this traditional debugging experience by recording specific
events and data at these points in time
F5 Debugging
Live debugging from Visual Studio, unit tests, and other developer experiences
Production Debugging
Collection on production systems for later analysis on a development machine

11. COLLECTION MODES
Low impact (events only)
Interesting runtime events are collected
Low overhead if collecting low-frequency events
High impact (events and call information)
Every method call is collected
Up to 10x potential slowdown
Configure for specific modules only to reduce
impact

12. ADVANCED
Store IntelliTrace recording
Limit the size
Navigation gutter
TFS Symbol lookup

13. EVENTS
WCF, ADO.NET, file access, registry
access, ASP.NET, and myriads of other
events
Can customize with your own events

14. MODULES
By default IntelliTrace records
information for all the modules used
by your solution
You can specify the modules to
include or the modules to exclude
from IntelliTrace

15. WHAT EXACTLY IS COLLECTED?
Parameters
Return values
Reference type locals
For each referenced object, whether
or not it was there, but not its
contents
void ReadTweets(string account)
{
var tweets = GetTweets(account);
int count = 3;
for (int i = 0; i < count; ++i)
DisplayTweet(tweets[i]);
}

16. EVENTS TIMELINE
Break Events track: This track shows events that stopped the execution of the application, such
as breakpoints being hit, steps, the “Break All” pause button at the top being
clicked, Debugger.Break() code statements and breaking exceptions
IntelliTrace Events track: This track shows all the other events collected by IntelliTrace that are
not break events, such as SQL queries being execution, program output, ASP.NET web requests,
file access, registry access, gestures, and so on

17. EVENTS DETAILS
Event: The short description of the event that has been collected
Time: The number of seconds of application run time that had elapsed when the event
was collected.
Duration: The duration of the event, in milliseconds
Thread: The name or ID of the thread that was responsible for generating the event

18. DEBUGGING WITH
INTELLITRACE DEEP DIVE
DEMO

19. WRAP-UP
Things we covered:
New user experience (Diagnostic Tools)
Improved debugging workflow
Reduced bug investigation time
Ability to detect unexpected behavior
Other things you could explore:
IntelliTrace Standalone Collector
Integration with Microsoft Test Manager
Integration with Microsoft Monitoring Agent

20. WHO I AM
Mirco Vanini
Microsoft® MVP Windows Development
AllSeen Alliance - AllJoyn® Ambassador
Open Connectivity Foundation - OCF® Ambassador
www.adamfactory.com
mirco.vanini@adamfactory.com
@MircoVanini
TinyCLR.it