IntelliTrace and the ‘magic’ of Historical Debugging

I love my job, I get to spread the good news on how to work efficiently with source code and solve very real-life problems.
I recently visited a development team in Nevada that was eager to learn more about Visual Studio debugging tools and the C# compiler Open Source project in GitHub, named ‘Roslyn’.
The highlight of the sessions was the ‘discovery’ of IntelliTrace and how they could use this feature in improving the communication between the development team in Nevada and the QA team at another location. A few hard to reproduce bugs had been filed recently, one of them being intermittent without a consistent set of steps to reproduce. This team was using process dumps and WinDbg to try and pinpoint the cause, but, even though process dumps have their reason of being, the size of the dump files made the quest to search for a root cause quite difficult.

This is until they tried IntelliTrace in their QA environments.

IntelliTrace is similar to a flight recorder. It records every event the airplane goes through from take off to landing. IntelliTrace had its debut in Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate and is now here to stay.

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