Editing the IntelliTrace collection plan
March 9, 2015
As you probably already know, Visual Studio offers an enhanced debugging experience through the use of IntelliTrace. Your application’s execution is recorded by IntelliTrace and you can navigate through time, both backwards and forwards, and examine your code as you normally would during a debugging session by interacting with the Call Stack and Locals windows.
The collection plan is the compilation of all settings that tell IntelliTrace what data to collect while the application is running:
- What interesting events to collect
- Whether to collect method calls and parameters
- Whether to whitelist or blacklist certain assemblies
When you are using IntelliTrace within Visual Studio, you change these settings through Tools > Options > IntelliTrace:
The IntelliTrace standalone collector does not have a graphical UI, it uses PowerShell commands instead. One of the arguments to the command that starts collection is the path to an .xml file that represents the collection plan. The download for the collector contains two collection plans out of the box:
- collection_plan.ASP.NET.trace.xml: Equates to the default IntelliTrace setting in Visual Studio
- collection_plan.ASP.NET.default.xml: Equates to selecting “IntelliTrace events and call information” from the General tab of the IntelliTrace options in Visual Studio.
If you want to make changes to either of these collection plans you have two options:
Option 1: Use a community tool on CodePlex called IntelliTrace Collection Plan Configurator, which makes the functionality of Tools > Options > IntelliTrace available for the standalone collector as seen below:
Option 2: Or you can do it the hard way and manually edit the .xml file
Please give us your feedback so that we can improve. You can leave general comments and questions at the end of this blog post or via Send-a-Smile, and submit feature requests to our IntelliTrace UserVoice.
Thanks
Well as you mentioned above for the manual procedure,
I found some error on this, can you provide some other links.
What kind of errors did you find? I'm going to take a look myself to see if I can spot them.
Your description of default and trace collection plans is swapped.
@Richard thank you for the tip, but actually my descriptions are accurate. The file names are a bit confusing because .default does not represent the default VS2015 collection settings. I'm reluctant to change these files names now that people are used to them, I'm not sure how productive such a change would be.