John shows us how IntelliTrace can be our secret debugging super power

John Robbins' Blog - IntelliTrace: Making On Time Shipping Possible

"Last week the Microsoft Central District asked me to come down and do a road show through Texas and Arkansas. What a road show it was; seven flights, six different hotels, and 20+ hours driving between places in six days. But it was all worth it because I got to talk about my favorite feature in Visual Studio: IntelliTrace.

What I find sad about today’s debugging tools is that they are essentially warmed over 1970’s technology. We are still setting a breakpoint on a source line in the debugger like just like your great grandparents were back in their day. The art has moved very little if at all. In an ideal world, we would have tools that record the video of your application’s internals but wouldn’t destroy performance. That’s exactly what IntelliTrace was designed to accomplish.

The ability to have that IntelliTrace video of the events that happened while debugging your application day-to-day is the key to debugging faster. As Steve McConnell’s outstanding book Code Complete 2^nd ed. mentions your average team spends 50% of their time debugging or performance tuning. No matter how agile, scrummy, or kanbanny you get, shrinking that debugging time is the key to shipping on time. I use IntelliTrace religiously and I’m easily debugging 10%-20% faster. That’s a massive speed up in overall development time.

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At //build/ this year I was able to hang out with John (and Jeff) for an hour or so which was pretty awesome. Damn, talk about feeling like a little fish... lol Both guys were awesome through and made me feel very comfortable and welcome.

Anyway, at my current gig, we're on VS Premium and I've been building a case to upgrade us to Ultimate... bizCase += This.Post