Debugging code in production with IntelliTrace

Applications frequently seem to have the frustrating characteristic of performing very well during the development and test cycle, only to be followed up by randomly misbehaving in production environments for no apparent reason. This results in a frantic effort to try and figure out what's going wrong from bug reports such as "it just stopped working" and "nothing updated but I don't know why". Diagnosing these problems in a production environment can be rather tricky, especially if you are in an environment where you have no production access. This is where IntelliTrace can help.

A traditional dump file only provides a capture of the runtime environment as a moment in time; with IntelliTrace, a more lengthy and detailed record is made. IntelliTrace was introduced in Visual Studio 2010 as a way for developers and testers to record what they'd just done, leading up to a bug, and then step back through those actions to make a diagnosis of the bug...