Debugging Applications for MicrosoftВ® .NET and Microsoft WindowsВ® (Pro-Developer)

What's Next for FlowTrace

I've found the output to FlowTrace to be a great learning tool. As with all utilities, there's still some room for it to grow. If you're looking for an interesting project, here is some cool functionality you could add to FlowTrace:

• Add to the .FLS file a start-and-stop logging feature based on specific classes and methods. This would allow you to control exactly what you wanted to see traced without being overwhelmed by all the other stuff going on. Ideally, you should make this work on a per-thread basis as well as a global thread basis. You'll also get extra credit if you make the class and method matching as regular expressions, which would give you extra power in deciding what you don't want to see.

• It would be nice to start with no logging happening at all and have an external trigger tell FlowTrace to start logging from a specific point. Of course, you should also implement the stop logging as well!

• The infrastructure is already in FlowTrace, so you might want to add function timings to the output.

• Instead of saving the output to a text file, you could record and display the output in a GUI application that was pseudo-real time.

• Finally, the output files for an application can be quite large. What would be nice is an option to filter out common bottom-level calls such as Object..ctor.