Software Diagnostics Developer Edition Enterprise

Software Diagnostics Developer Edition & Developer Edition Enterprise
SD Developer Edition is an integrated recorder, debugger, and profiler for system dynamics. Being seamlessly integrated into Microsoft Visual Studio, it significantly accelerates debugging activities and improves comprehension of system behavior. The Developer Edition records the internal activity of a running system and stores the captured runtime behavior as trace data.

• Debugging: Developer Edition is a debugging tool that visualizes complete recordings of runtime behavior. It is applicable with minimal side-effects to system execution including multithreaded applications. Tracing can be done with automated or manual level of detail. Traces enable developers to perform Reverse Debugging.
• Implementing New Features and Feature Change Request: Developer Edition accelerates and facilitates the identification of “the right place” to integrate new features into existing code base.
• Performance Analysis and Memory Leak detection: the CPU costs of function execution are revealed, helping to identify the performance of the application.

The Developer Edition is dedicated to developers and testers as well as project managers and architects. It reduces costs in debugging efforts, speeds up the time to market of software and reduces inconsistencies in software development. It creates transparency and rapid comprehension of complex software systems for existing and new team members.

Tracing Engine

• Seamless integration into Microsoft Visual Studio.
• Minimal performance overhead. Analyze even multithreaded applications.
•  “Single-click” tracing without rebuild. Start and stop tracing anytime.
• Control flow tracing automatically. Reveals the nested structure of function calls.
• Recording program states with “Probes” (function parameter tracing/variable state tracing/memory access tracing).

Analysis Engine

• Multiple Views: 7 views are available in Developer Edition. All views are synchronized.
• A function selected in one view will be highlighted in all the other views. 

Code View

• In Microsoft Visual Studio´s source code view, markers are placed that indicate in which call code lines were executed.
• Additionally, the markers reveal the real function that was called. This valuable information solves the problem arising from polymorphism and function pointers.

Timeline View

• Overview on application behavior during complete tracing period.
• Function activity over time is visualized, which permits you to identify execution phases and patterns.
• Selecting points in time or time periods for more detailed analysis in the Call Stack view.

Call Stack View

• Temporal representation of tracing data.
• Visual depiction of the call stack over time.
• You have the call stack for a complete tracing period.
• You can travel back and forth in time.
• Function calls contain information on parameter values if Probes were active during tracing.

Single Call View

• Representation of all subcalls that are triggered for a selected call.
• View is an intermediate view between graphical views and source code views. It essentially reduces the source code to code lines with executed call statements.
• Used to quickly grasp what happens in the respective function during execution and to find a subcall of interest.

Call Graph View

• Structural representation of trace data.
• Caller and callee relation between selected functions.
• Interactively unfolding and hiding subcalls.
• Annotation of call relations with performance statistics: “call count” and “call costs”.
• Color encodes performance statistics.

Search View

• Complete trace data is searchable.
• Quickly identify and navigate to functions of interest.
• Quickly find variable values of interest captured in Probes.

MemoryLeak Tracing (Identifying Memory Leaks) - available in Software Diagnostics Developer Edition Enterprise only
Software Diagnostics Developer Edition Enterprise records the internal activity of a running system and stores the captured runtime behavior as trace data. SD Developer Edition Enterprise adds the benefit of MemoryLeak Tracing - Identifying Memory Leaks. You can apply Memory Leak tracing for finding memory leaks on any freely running process that has been activated for snapshot tracing before hand. "Freely running process" means that you have not stopped your application in the Visual Studio debugger. Nevertheless, it is possible to have the Visual Studio debugger being attached to your application process.

To find memory leaks you have to take 2 snapshots: the "start snapshot" and the "stop snapshot". SD Developer Edition Enterprise makes a difference between the 2 snapshots and reveals all call stacks where memory had been allocated but not been deallocated.

Software Diagnostics Developer Edition Product Differences