ETWControler 1.0.0.0 Released!
During the end of 2013 I had a little free time to create a tool to help diagnose performance problems in distributed systems. If you have a machine connected to a remote server and you want to find out why e.g. your game sometimes has hiccups you can run ETWControler on both boxes to get ETW tracing from both machines at the same time.
That alone of course could also be achieved with a shell script. But there is more to it. It comes with a full keyboard and mouse logger where all keyboard and mouse events are sent to ETW on the client, over the network to the server. There are the the received keyboard/mouse events also written to ETW.
That allows you to correlate in an easy way the local/remote and network traces with full timing information. More info's can be found at its CodePlex site.
The main use cases are covered here
Here are some screenshots:
It was fun to learn WPF and MVVM by creating my first WPF application. WPF although no longer hip is a great way to create good looking desktop apps quite fast. Perhaps I was learning an old thing but old things are likely to stay for the next 20 years. If you read the code you will find that it uses an socket quite directly to send the keyboard events as fast and clean over the wire as possible which was also an interesting exercise to learn how hard it is to use plain sockets. Sockets have way to many options to configure them in funny ways where the connection will never time out and things like that.
If you have found creative uses for this tool or interesting ideas how to extend it drop me note. Currently I am thinking about to add more control about what should be recorded by using TraceEvent instead of WPR to have more ETW collection options.