How do you know if your users are using a given application and/or feature? Or how often they are using it? Check out the free, included with VS2010, “Dotfuscator Software Services - Community Edition”

Visual Basic How Do I Video Series - How Do I: Monitor Application and Feature Usage in Visual Studio 2010?

“Do you know how your users are really using your applications? Do you want the insights that an easy and effective Customer Experience Improvement Program can provide? See how to quickly instrument your applications to track real world usage by leveraging the functionality included in Visual Studio 2010 with Dotfuscator. Learn how to implement session tracking to determine what applications have been executed, what versions of those applications, and for how long. Also learn how to implement feature usage tracking to determine what features are being used, in what sequence, and for how long…

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Deep Fried Bytes - Episode 22: The Future of .NET Dotfuscator with Gabriel Torok

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Keith and Woody sat down with PreEmptive President Gabriel Torok to discuss the news that Microsoft is including PreEmptive’s Dotfuscator Community Edition in Visual Studio 2010. The guys also discussed how Dotfuscator can be used to assist with Feature Monitoring, Usage Expiry, and Tamper Defense. …”

Visual Basic Development Center - Using Visual Studio 2010 to Collect Usage, Performance and Stability Information to Improve Software

“Gabriel Torok
Preemptive Solutions

Contents

Dotfuscator Considered as a Post-Build Code Injection Platform
A Concrete Example
Take Away

In Visual Studio 2010, Dotfuscator CE’s new official name is “Dotfuscator Software Services - Community Edition”. It has been renamed to emphasize its broader focus as a post-build tool in this release. A whole new class of features and services based on code injection has been added, and it has a new look, reorganizing and simplifying the user interface to improve usability and discoverability. Finally, there are improvements on the traditional obfuscation functions you may already be using. In this article, I’d like to introduce you to the new code injection features. Using these features might just help you build better software, faster.

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I’ve been thinking about building something like this for a couple of my work applications. I want to see if a given app is being used, how much, and if some of the features in it are (so I can justify killing some features, or investing time to improving it, all with some hard numbers). Looks like someone was reading my mind… :)