IntelliTrace & *.itrace files eating your drive space?

ObjectSmart - Steve's Identity Blog - Missing Drive Space? Check IntelliTrace Files

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To find out where my space went, I turned to a simple little tool called Disk Space Finder by IntelliConcepts.  There are probably a million applications like this, but this is the one I always seems to remember.  It scans through your hard drive checking file sizes and breaks down usage as necessary.

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If you leave IntelliTrace enabled for all debugging you could potentially end up with a couple hundred *.itrace files like I did (not actually pictured).  It looks like an itrace file is created every time the debugger is attached to a process, so effectively every time you hit F5 a file is created.  Doubly so if you are debugging multiple launchable projects at once.

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The quick fix is to just delete the files and/or stop using IntelliTrace.  I recommend just deleting the files because I think IntelliTrace is an amazing—if not a little undercooked – tool.  It’s a v1 product.  Considering what it’s capable of, this is a minor blemish.

The long term fix is to install Visual Studio 2010 SP1, as there is apparently a fix for this issue.  The downside of course is that SP1 is still in beta.  Hence long term.” [GD: Click through to for the path. I didn’t want to leach too much from the original post, walking that fine web curation line]

This tip helped me recover a couple gigs of drive space across a couple of machines. Now this amount might be an edge case, given I launch a number of VS solutions as part of my blogging. Still I was surprised at the amount used and how much drive space I was able to recover (hence my sharing of the post ;) 

Final note, my favorite “drive space usage spelunking tool” is WinDirStat (blog post). Whenever I need to hunt drive space hogging files, this is my utility of choice…