IntelliTrace is a new and very interesting feature of Windows Azure Tools SDK, June 2010 release. It, along with its other features, enables debugging of application in the cloud. This feature is available in Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate only.
IntelliTrace provides an enhanced picture of the application compared to the traditional debugging. Traditional Debuggers provides the current state of the application with very limited information of the events occurred in the past. While, IntelliTrace fetches the information of the events, along with their context, occurred in the past. It is, by default, turned on and has the minimal effect on the application performance. Debugging with IntelliTrace has many advantages:
- IntelliTrace can save time by shortening the debugging cycle.
- IntelliTrace allows debugging errors and crashes that would otherwise be non-reproducible. It creates a log file which has a .iTrace extension and can be debugged with all the powers of IntelliTrace.
Debugging a cloud application with IntelliTrace support requires .Net 4, Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate and a cloud service has to be deployed with IntelliTrace enabled. If a 32-bit OS is used, then this patch/QFE would be required.
Reference: MSDN Library
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Kunal, K Kapoor
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