Wednesday, December 08, 2010

Using IntelliTrace outside the IDE - 64-bit Applications

IntelliTrace is one of my favorite features in Visual Studio Ultimate 2010, alongside the debugger and the new C++ IntelliSense and VC++ libraries.
There are some neat things that I've done using IntelliTrace without the IDE at all, such as collecting from 64-bit applications, monitoring test runs that I can't use Microsoft Test Manager to test, and much more.
I'm going to show you how to use the command line to collect and IntelliTrace log from a 32-bit or 64-bit process.

Locating the Collection Plan

Inside of the "Team Tools\TraceDebugger Tools" directory beneath the Visual Studio 2010 installation, you will find two files:

IntelliTrace.exe
en\CollectionPlan.xml

If you are using a version of VS 2010 that is not English, you will find the CollectionPlan.xml file under a directory named after your localized language name.
These two files allow us to use IntelliTrace without the IDE at all.  The easiest way to launch an application with IntelliTrace is to use the launch command:

IntelliTrace.exe launch /collectionplan:CollectionPlan.xml /file:out.iTrace MyAwesomeExecutable.exe

Read more: Matthew Saffer's IntelliTrace Blog