Windows Developer Power Tools

15.0 Introduction

Too much of the developer’s average day is spent investigating why something either doesn’t work in the first place or has mysteriously stopped working. Troubleshooting and debugging can be a frustrating exercise, causing you to beat your head against your keyboard trying to figure out which process is trashing a registry key, or why HTML traffic between your web application and its clients has suddenly become corrupted.

All the various incarnations of Visual Studio offer terrific debugging capabilities, including such great features as being able to step into a web service from client-side code. However, there are plenty of scenarios that fall outside of what you can accomplish with Visual Studio, and in these cases you’ll need to look elsewhere for help.

Trying to determine the causes of “first visit” performance issues in Visual Studio isn’t easy, because there’s no simple way to see exactly how many requests and bytes are going across the wire—but the Fiddler tool will show you this information in an instant. Finding out which methods are bottlenecks in your code is nigh-on impossible if you don’t have access to Visual Studio Team Systems for Testers—but NProf can point you to the troublesome spots. Need to figure out what process is locking a file? No chance in Visual Studio, but Filemon and Process Explorer will direct you right to the culprit.

Similar tools abound to fill the gaps of other troubleshooting problems, helping you isolate the causes of everything ...