Debugging all events in Visual Studio 2010 without setting break points

Question

I am trying to debug a windows form application which has a large number of events: button presses, timers, etc..

Is there a way to catch every line of code being ex

Answer 1

If you're using the Ultimate edition of your Visual Studio 2010 you can use its new feature called IntelliTrace (previously Historical Debugger). This will allow you to do exactly what you want - be able to see all method calls and events that happened during execution of your program, and you'll be able to jump back to the event which you need.

To enable IntelliTrace, go to Tools → Options → IntelliTrace, and check the "Enable IntelliTrace" checkbox, and select one of two modes: "events only" or "events and call information", then run your application with a debugger (F5).

The difference between the two modes is that the latter uses the profiler to collect all runtime information, so you get a complete call stack, however you won't be able to use edit-and-continue features of the debugger.

You can find more in this series of articles, and of course, on MSDN.

Answer 2

You could also try a code coverage tool.

For example, if you have Resharper and dotCover, you can run your application (via the dotCover->Cover Application... menu item) and when the application finishes, dotCover will show you which lines of code were run in the VS IDE by highlighting them in green. Lines of code which where not run are coloured in red.

I don't know if there are other tools which do this, but it's an option.

Answer 3

I developed the Runtime Flow tool to solve exactly this problem - to understand a large unfamiliar .NET codebase via realtime function calls monitoring. It's similar to IntelliTrace, but places more emphasis on control flow than on debugging.