IntelliTrace

Miramar .Net User Group Meeting With Sam Abraham - July 13th, 2010

Sam Abraham — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 16:05:46 GMT

It was a pleasure speaking at the Miramar .Net User Group on July 13th, 2010. We discussed some of the basics of ASP.Net MVC as there were some attendees who did not have prior exposure to the Framework then moved to discuss the new features that MVC2 offers as well as the MVC dev tools available in Visual Studio 2010 (MVC Project Templates & Snippets) that make development even easier.

Audience was quiet engaged and we had lots of fun discussing MVC2 and its applicability to today's development needs as well as related newly released tools such as WebMatrix and Razor and what they offer for MVC developers.

My next speaking engagement will also be at Devry University in Miramar, FL at SQL Saturday #40 on July 31st where I will be speeaking about dynamically creating SSIS packages using C#.

Looking forward to meeting you all soon.

--Sam Abraham

Sam Abraham to Speak about MVC2 at the Florida.Net Miramar .Net User Group on July 13 2010

Sam Abraham — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 16:41:43 GMT

I am scheduled to give a presentation at the Miramar .Net User Group on July 13, 2010 about MVC and the new features in MVC2. This will be similar to the talk I gave a few days ago at the LI .Net User Group in NY, yet will have more advanced content since the Miramar .Net User Group already had an introduction to MVC in a previous meeting. Here is the topic and speaker bio:

What's New in MVC2
We will start by briefly reviewing the basics of the Microsoft MVC Framework. Next, we will look at the new features introduced in the latest and greatest MVC2. Many new enhancements were introduced to both the MS MVC Framework and to VS2010 to improve developers' experience and reduce development time. We will be talking about new MVC2 features such as: Model Validation, Areas and Template Helpers. We will also discuss the new built-in MVC project templates that ship with VS2010.

About the Speaker
Sam Abraham is a Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP) and Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist (MCTS ASP.Net 3.5) He currently lives in South Florida where he leads the West Palm Beach .Net User Group (www.fladotnet.com) and actively participates in various local .Net Community events as organizer and/or technical speaker. Sam is also an active committee member on various initiatives at the South Florida Chapter of the Project Management Institute (www.southfloridapmi.org). Sam finds his passion in leveraging latest and greatest .Net Technologies along with proven Project Management practices and methodologies to produce high quality, cost-competitive software. Sam can be reached through his blog: http://www.geekswithblogs.net/wildturtle

UPDATED: IntelliTrace As a Learning Tool for MVC2 in a VS2010 Project

Sam Abraham — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 00:28:05 GMT

IntelliTrace is a new feature in Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate Edition. I see this valuable tool as a “Program Execution Recorder” that captures information about events and calls taking place as soon as we hit the VS2010 play (Start Debugging) button or the F5 key. Many online resources already discuss IntelliTrace and the benefit it brings to both developers and testers alike so I see no value of just repeating this information.

In this brief blog entry, I would like to share with you how I will be using IntelliTrace in my upcoming talk at the Ft Lauderdale ArcSig .Net User Group Meeting on April 20th 2010 (check http://www.fladotnet.com for more information), as a learning tool to demonstrate the internals of the lifecycle of an MVC2 application. I will also be providing some helpful links that cover IntelliTrace in more detail at the end of my article for reference. UPDATE: I am also including a video of Scott Hanselman using the VS2010 "Call Stack" to showcase MVC in DevDays 2010.

IntelliTrace is setup by default to only capture execution events. Microsoft did such a great job on optimizing its recording process that I haven’t even felt the slightest performance hit with IntelliTrace running as I was debugging my solutions and projects. For my purposes here however, I needed to capture more information beyond execution events, so I turned on the option for capturing calls in addition to events as shown in Figures 1 and 2. Changing capture options will require us to stop our debugging session and start over for the new settings to take place.

Figure 1 – Access IntelliTrace options via the Tools->Options menu items

Figure 2 – Change IntelliTrace Options to capture call information as well as events

Notice the warning with regards to potentially degrading performance when selecting to capture call information in addition to the default events-only setting. I have found this warning to be sure true. My subsequent tests showed slowness in page load times compared to rendering those same exact pages with the “event-only” option selected.

Execution recording is auto-started along with the new debugging session of our project. At this point, we can simply interact with the application and continue executing normally until we decide to “playback” the code we have executed so far. For code replay, first step is to “break” the current execution as show in Figure 3.

Figure 3 – Break to replay recording

A few tries later, I found a good process to quickly find and demonstrate the MVC2 page lifecycle.
First-off, we start with the event view as shown in Figure 4 until we find an interesting event that needs further studying.

Figure 4 – Going through IntelliTrace’s events and picking as specific entry of interest

We now can, for instance, study how the highlighted HTTP GET request is being handled, by clicking on the “Calls View” for that particular event. Notice that IntelliTrace shows us all calls that took place in servicing that GET request. Double clicking on any call takes us to a more granular view of the call stack within that clicked call, up until getting to a specific line of code where we can do a line-by-line replay of the execution from that point onwards using F10 or F11 just like our typical good old VS2008 debugging helped us accomplish.

Figure 5 – switching to call view on an event of interest

Figure 6 – Double clicking on call shows a more granular view of the call stack.

In conclusion, the introduction of IntelliTrace as a new addition to the VS developers’ tool arsenal enhances development and debugging experience and effectively tackles the “no-repro” problem. It will also hopefully enhance my audience’s experience listening to me speaking about an MVC2 page lifecycle which I can now easily visually demonstrate, thereby improving the probability of keeping everybody awake a little longer.

IntelliTrace References:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/ee336126.aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd264944(VS.100).aspx

UPDATE: Scott Hanselman using the VS2010 "Call Stack" to showcase MVC:

http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/matthijs/ASPNET-MVC-2-Basics-Introduction-by-Scott-Hanselman/