Wednesday, September 11, 2002

Another addition to .NET developer's toolbox: Peter Drayton has a very useful little utility  that allows provides automatic call tracing. Extremely easy to use and very practical for debussing those triky remoting or multithreaded pieces.



The TraceHook.NET service is a context attribute that provides automatic call tracing on attributed classes. It traces instance method calls & field/property accesses to the debug output, allowing one to monitor an application as it runs. The trace includes type names, method names, parameter names & values (both [in] & [out]), as well as any return codes or thrown exceptions. Full, commented source is included, thus it should also serve as an interesting demonstration of the use of context attributes & interception in the .NET platform.


The source code was based on beta release of .NET, so I've sent Peter a few code changes to make the tool work with the latest framework.