dot.NET Profiler

The following dashboard ‘Layer Breakdown’ provides an extended in-depth view:

It shows which layers of the application contribute to the overall performance
in order to get a fast top view on where most of the time was consumed.

The layers can be customized, so that you are able to view your trace output
from different perspectives.

New in SpeedTrace Pro 4.0.15:

New Features:

• Added TraceAnalyzer – new drilldowns

Enhancements:

• improved: Trace Analyzer / Layer Breakdown- default chart type set to barChart
• improved icons

BugFixes:

• Layer Breakdown – corrected calculation problem

Learn more about SpeedTrace Pro >>

We are proud to announce that we have just released our
NEW Version 4.0 CTP!

SpedTrace ProVersion 4.0 boasts …

The first builds have been geared to facilitate installation and setups in different environments, smooth navigation flow, feature a lot of highly useful enhancements and will eventually end up to including major strands of unmanaged code.

… even faster tracing!

Due to structural improvements the new version is even faster than the previous one!
First striking advantages of this version (first builds) already include:

Environment / Installation

• No VM checks
• Reduced interference probability with other profilers

Easier navigation / IIS tracing

• Easier IIS/ASP.Net Handling
• NEW Projekt Browser (enhanced UI Feeling)
• Application Pool Browser
• Remote Website Browser
• Automatic Application Pool Restart

New features

• CPU time tracking (tracing, sampling)
• Client.TraceSessionManager
• Redesigned configuration client using SpeedTrace Recording API, Analysis API,
  enhanced flexibility
• Trace session can be split into multiple TraceFiles
• Merge trace files
• Faster tracing
• .. and many more to come ..

Request your trial license now!

Wouldn’t you like to be one of the first to try out cutting-edge software diagnostics technology?

Just send in a request, and we’ll provide you with a trial license!

Download request here: ipcas.com/trace-and-profile/download.html

We got a lot of acclaim for the nearly boundless opportunities that our trace profiler opens to all lines of software development, consulting, support, maintenance and monitoring.

SpeedTrace Pro – turn of the year reflections

The year 2010 has been an exciting one: In previous years SpeedTrace Pro has proven to provide the ideal concept for tracing and profiling dotNET apps most accurately and reliably, yielding most conclusive results within split seconds. This year’s highlight “Freely Distributable Trace Agent” service and other salient cloud-computing features have made SpeedTrace Pro’s scope practically UBIQUITOUS – throughout networks and the internet !

Range of applicability

The scope of SpeedTrace Pro in combination with cloud-computing has hardly been thoroughly fathomed yet. Networkability simply opens thousands of doors for QA-integrated development, and enhances security-sensitive maintenance and support:

• helping distributed and outsourced teams throughout networks to coordinate bugs-fixing, performance issues solving and getting at the bottom of severe software failures and breakdowns saving you oodles of time and money
• enabling proactive monitoring and project management within networks to streamline code architecture to perfection and avoid critical situations
• rationalizing your security concept on a network scale to send warnings before failures take place
• Redefining your maintenance concept by shortening times to maintenance and remedial action
• providing you with the complete picture of all the circumstances that lead to a failure

Outlook for 2011

We are planning to take on new challenges to create further leading-edge features and are already preparing the ground for even more powerful and amazing functionality.

Seasonal greetings

The SpeedTrace Pro Team would like to thank you all for your appreciation, support and valuable feedback and warmly welcomes you to continue making good use of our support.

We wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Your SpeedTrace Pro Team

We’ve just recently released a new build of SpeedTrace Pro with a couple of enhancements:

• The 10 GB trace file limitation has been removed !
• We’ve added a new sample for the test automation API to demonstrate how to continuously trace processes

Minor bug fixes were also made to further improve license management and feature deployment.

Try SpeedTrace Pro today >>

Our latest and perhaps last build (Version 3.4.15) prior to release has been complemented with optional plugins to wide-spread tools in order to facilitate unit testing especially for a larger group of developers familiar with and attached to those tools:

• NUnit
• Resharper (See video)

These options have been added for extra convenience rather than out of necessity primarily because we believe that systematic unit testing, test automation and test-driven development are so important.

Why unit testing?

Unit testing helps you verify and validate your source code to see (and measure) whether (to what extent) its components suit their designed purposes and behave as expected.  The idea is to isolate each part of a program and show that the individual components are well-formed right from the outset. Unit tests minutely state the “contract specifications” of a piece of code as to what it is supposed to satisfy and thus afford several benefits:

• Find problems early in the development cycle
• Ensure that code reflects intended functions in spite of changes
• Test parts first to facilitate integration testing
• Document critical code unit by unit
• Prevent performance from deteriorating.

Unit testing for performance and bug trapping

For bug trapping create a test that replicates the bug, and then redesign your code accordingly. By adding the fix to your test suite you can ensure that the test case will always be checked throughout the entire development lifecycle. For continued performance assurance you can use the SpeedTrace API in order to trace the executed scenarios and to perform sanity checks making standard assumptions that the elapsed times are within bounds of the desired performance.

Unit testing in test automation enviroment for optimized lifecycle management
and QA-internalized development

Why test automation (TA)?

Unit testing within the SpeeedTrace Pro Test Auotmation (TA) environment is performed systematically in “zipper”-fashion parallel to the development process repeatedly unit by unit at short intervals (See diagram). It thus becomes an integral part of the TA and lends itself appreciably to optimizing lifecycle management and proactively internalizing QA into your entire development process.

Unit testing with SpeedTrace Pro

Of course, you can do all this with SpeedTrace Pro using a much wider array of features, functions and triggers. Nevertheless, we wanted users accustomed to these wide-spread unit testing tools to also benefit from SpeedTrace Pro’s more comprehensive approach to software diagnostics.

This is to anounce that SpeedTrace Version 3.4 adding powerful cloud computing functionality is to be released soon before the end of this month!

New cutting edge cloud computing features

The new SpeedTrace Pro Version 3.4 adds even more cutting-edge functionality:

-    Freely Distributable Recorder Service
-    Test Automation Interface
-    Remote Tracing Capabilities
-    Distributed Tracing Capabilities

This is especially good news for people interested in remote monitoring, testing, maintenance and support – over the cloud! These features respectably add up to complete the diagnostics for the entire lifecycle of your software regardless of location!

Ubiquitous remote tracing free of charge

With the new SpeedTrace Pro version and the help of the Freely Redistributable Recorder providing free recorder service (1st Setup) you can now trace any external client via Internet/network free of charge. Due to Remote Tracing and Distributed Tracing capabilities you can also remote-trace this recorded data from your server where – provided you have a SpeedTrace license – the trace data can be read, interpreted, profiled, evaluated with the help of the SpeedTrace profiler (2nd Setup).

Profile distributed apps over the cloud

As to the mode, number, and frequency of your trace data instalments, that is something you can configure yourself with SpeedTrace according to your own special requirements. In principle, the Freely Redistributable Recorder of SpeedTrace Version 3.4 works like the black box deployed in aviation. With the respective time stamps you can always trace what happened during an event, what lead up to it and with some interpretation (profiling) find out what actually caused it … you can now even do this over the cloud!

Get your free trial now!

In the last entry I’ve touched upon the odds software developers face in view of a highly competitive market environment and how to overcome the dilemmas posed. Now I’d like to just highlight the advantages of integrating your profiling and tracing throughout the entire lifecycle of your application to achieve ultimate quality assurance. Please spare a moment to consider …

Optimize SW development right from the outset!

Streamline your developing process with SpeedTrace Pro to raise productivity and effectiveness by introducing quality management and software performance checks in the very early stages of development. Trim down your test phases and thereby minimize time for corrections. Shorten your development cycles without ungainly side-effects, achieve real competitive edge and increase your ROI.

Use SpeedTrace Pro – the sooner the better!

By proactively starting to profile your code in the initial stages and integrating your performance checks for every step in the development process, you will avoid the risk of dragging bugs and flaws throughout the project which may later cause stability issues. Build and raise your software architecture on a sound and stable foundation with SpeedTrace Pro. Identify performance issues and bottlenecks in no time and detect the flaws in your source code before they get a chance to become big sources of instability in the final stages.

Use SpeedTrace Pro – better late than never!

Even if you cannot manage to start profiling until the end of a development phase, SpeedTrace Pro’s super-fast trace engine is extremely apt to pinpoint your problem in next to no time. Its rich functionality (wide range of settings, views, filters, triggers, special features, etc.) will certainly help you to lay bare the complex processes that lead to it and finally enable you to drill down to the root causes in your code lines.

Version 3.4 cloud power expands diagnostics

Version 3.4 to be released shortly adds new cutting-edge functionality (test automation, remote/distributed tracing and profiling) essentially extending monitoring capabilities beyond the release phase into maintenance and support. It thus expands the diagnostics to the entire lifecycle of your application regardless of time or location, making it virtually ubiquitous on request.

Achieve competitive edge, integral quality management supreme customer satisfaction – with SpeedTrace Pro! Download SpeedTrace Pro 3.4 now!

Performance, speed and stability – Issue No. 1

In all fields of software development, consumer demands and immense competition are mounting pressures to increase performance, speed and stability at an accelerating pace. Increasingly realistic computer graphics, real-time rendition and stable flow scenarios require highly sophisticated computer hardware and software. Every millisecond counts! Any runtime lost can lead to jerky presentation, lags, loss of data or hung sessions.

Software quality in a competitive world

The development lifecycles of software are being forcibly narrowed under the growing pressures of highly competitive markets. Increasingly more sophisticated follow-up versions have to be released with shorter lifecycles. Whoever is first to release any software product, is apt to win the race. However, here comes the dilemma: Shortening lifecycles under pressure tend to lead to error-prone software. Consequently, a growing number of service packs have to be issued to correct imperfect versions. This in fact shows that the time to develop has actually been pushed into the support phase. Users are liable to become involuntary beta testers having to install one update after another …

Costs of error under pressure

Unaided and badly equipped software testers and developers might have indistinct hunches or vague ideas why their software does not behave as expected under certain circumstances. But they usually have an insufficient notion why, let alone where or how, so much memory space, capacity and time gets wasted on simple tasks and why things are not working out properly according to plan. This is also why a lot of time gets lost on trouble-shooting, bug-trapping, and futile attempts to resolve performance issues and memory leaks.

Resolve the dilemma of quality under pressure

The SpeedTrace concept provides software developers and testers with just the answers they have been looking for: Conclusive issue resolution by getting to the root on the basis of objective measurements (no intrusion!)  – performed in no time and at very little cost.

The key to competitive edge is integrated quality assurance and sound lifecycle management with a high-end profiler-tracer like SpeedTrace Pro.

Why not get a free trial period of SpeedTrace Pro Version 3.4 with test automation enabling you to trace and profile your software products and developments over the cloud!

Download SpeedTrace Pro 3.4 and apply for a trial period now!

SpeedTrace Pro 3.4.11 – new build now online!

As promised we have endowed our SpeedTrace Pro 3.4 CTP Version with integrated security locks to ensure maximum security and prevent foreign party misuse (unauthorized access, spying attempts, etc.).

New feature in version 3.4.11 – Security!

Security locks with a range of options from password-protected settings to authorization restrictions have been integrated.

Version 3.4.11 ready for download!

You can download the current BUILD 3.4.11 here:

Downlaod SpeedTrace 3.4.11

Profiling over the cloud – Upside

Tracing and profiling over the cloud has tremendous advantages enabling companies to introduce near to realtime, potentially ubiquitous deployment and thus seemingly to overcome all restrictions of time and space …

Security issues – Downside

However, wherever there is an upside there usually is also a downside to any new functionality: Without taking the necessary precautions, working in the cloud (remote tracing, distributed trace agents) is liable to raise serious security issues. You might find yourself at peril of being exposed to unauthorized access and spying activities if you don’t have any built-in security locks to prevent misuse. We believe that taking all necessary precautionary measures is a top priority concern for any software development.

Built-in security locks – Right side up!

To address the issue, SpeedTrace Pro now has integrated security locks that block any unauthorized access and/or spying attempts. You now have a fair amount of options to guarantee internet security ranging from password-protected settings to authorization restrictions. The new SpeedTrace Pro CTP Build 3.4.11, ready for download later on this week, implements these to perfection.