Product Reviews
DevPartner Studio for Visual Studio .NET
Scale up your efforts to debug and monitor enterprise projects.
DevPartner Studio is a product designed to extend the capabilities of
Visual Studio .NET, primarily aimed at corporate developers working on
large distributed applications. As you move to a world where there are
hundreds of components interacting on various machines, you can outstrip
Visual Studio's ability to monitor and debug the application. That's where
DevPartner Studio is designed to come in (the product also supports VB6
and VC++6, though I didn't look at those facets of it).
The product supports five main areas:
Performance analysis can profile an application under execution
to locate bottlenecks and relate them back to source code modules and
individual lines of code.
Coverage analysis will track code as you execute it and let you
know which lines were never exercised. This is particularly useful for
knowing whether your automatic test suite is hitting all parts of the
product.
Distributed analysis lets you extend the performance and error
detection to cover applications stretching across multiple components
and computers. It correlates events to help you pinpoint problems in distributed
applications.
Error detection catches and reports on a number of runtime errors.
Many of these (like invalid pointer use) should be nonexistent in .NET
applications, but things like COM leaks (cause by poorly-written interop
code) and finalizer errors can still crop up.
Code review provides a rule-driven facility for locating potential
errors in code, such as using string concatenation instead of the StringBuilder
class, or making common logic errors. This part of the product can also
analyze variable naming for conformance with your conventions and provide
code metrics. There's a rules editor to let you customize the code review.
All of these capabilities are well-integrated with the Visual Studio
.NET shell, and easy to use. I didn't have any serious trouble exercising
the Professional edition on my test projects. Though this sort of product
isn't really aimed at the sort of development that I do (mainly small
utilities these days), it's obvious that it could be a boon for developers
and testers tackling a major project using diverse technologies.
About the Author
Mike Gunderloy, MCSE, MCSD, MCDBA, is a former MCP columnist and the author of numerous development books.