IntelliTrace in Visual Studio Enterprise 2015 now supports attach!
May 14, 2015
If you haven’t done so already, check out the announcement of IntelliTrace in Visual Studio Enterprise 2015 which gives you an overview of IntelliTrace and its UI. Since the release of Visual Studio Enterprise 2015 RC, IntelliTrace supports the ability to attach to running processes.
As soon as Visual Studio has successfully attached to the selected process the Diagnostic Tools window will show up. If it doesn’t, it may be because you previously closed it. You can bring back, even after you have attached, by clicking on the menu item Debug > Show Diagnostic Tools.
The only current limitation is that IntelliTrace cannot collect calls information when attaching to a running process. This means that IntelliTrace cannot collect the list of every method call made. If you attempt to attach with that option enabled nothing bad will happen, you simply won’t have access to the data.
We are always looking for feedback and comments for our features. You can leave general comments & questions at the end of this blog post or via Send-a-Smile, and submit feature requests to our IntelliTrace UserVoice. You can also send us a tweet or visit the MSDN Diagnostics forums.
Nice. Now make it Work with native c++.
"The only current limitation is that IntelliTrace cannot collect calls information when attaching to a running process. This means that IntelliTrace cannot collect the list of every method call made. If you attempt to attach with that option enabled nothing bad will happen, you simply won’t have access to the data."
Is this something that is targeted to be ready by RTM?
@Shane no we don't have plans to remove this limitation by RTM. Removing it requires a lot of work and we need to understand how many of our customers would benefit from it before we get started. Can you please help us understanding your needs a bit better by answering a few questions?
1. What type of application are you attaching to? (ASP.NET, WPF, Windows Service, etc.)
2. Why do you need to attach and you can't you simply F5 and debug? (do you know about debugging .exe? http://bit.ly/1JYDIE6)
3. What is most useful to you about collecting calls information? The fact that you have every method call or the parameters?
@Shane you can always also reach out to me directly at angelos.petropoulos@microsoft.com and discuss this
Will we be able to attach standalone collector too?
@OnurG No, the service needs to be restarted in order to collect data using the IntelliTrace Standalone Collector.
Angelos,
I've just tried the new IntelliTrace, and I think it's definitely improved. I was very happy to see that I could launch an executable which found a running copy of Word, and trace a managed-code addin instantiated through a COM addin shim!
HOWEVER, either I'm not seeing something which is right there, or it would seem to be missing a lot of features which would be very helpful and not all of them would that difficult to implement.
As just one example, if I select a line of code in the source window, why couldn't there be a feature to advance the historical playback pointer to the next (or previous) occurrence of that line in the execution sequence? It would be just as useful as setting a breakpoint in live execution, but probably a pretty trivial matter to accomplish in historical mode. That would also eliminate a huge amount of work trying to navigate. I see that there’s a context menu function to “Find this line in IntelliTrace”, but it doesn’t seem to do anything at all!
Another item I would like to see (or maybe I just overlooked it) would be a real, comprehensive help guide. It's nice to get blogs showing a few screen, and demonstrating IntelliTrace in a few circumstances, but there comes a point where you really need to know, concisely, every feature and how it really works.
@Fletcher I'm glad you reached out to me via email (angelos.petropoulos@microsoft.com). I encourage everyone interested to talk to the IntelliTrace product team to do the same.
Regarding documentation and help guides take a look at the following links:
blogs.msdn.com/…/learn-intellitrace.aspx
msdn.microsoft.com/…/dd264915.aspx