Trace Writer & Synchronicity
(Note: This is a two part blog post. First part is a
product announcement, second part is a question to
developers)
I've written a small program called TraceMonitor that is used to capture output from Trace.Write & Debug.Write, etc. I'm re-releasing it to the development community in the hopes that some people can get some use out of it. It's based on DBMon.exe, but allows a finer granularity in filtering and display. It displays an aggregate log, and also splits output from each program into it's own log so you can view an individual session. You can get it at http://www.szurgot.net/projects/default.aspx under TraceMonitor.
[ From Chris Szurgot's Blog ]
Isn’t synchronicity weird? Just this last week I’ve been
looking for a way to do
this. What I really
want is a light weight back channel for test results and
trace output. At
the moment
NUnitAddin
uses .NET Remoting to send back test results from the test
runner. This works
fine until you come to work on a channel sink
multi-process application. If you do you’ll find that outputting trace information
affects the code you’re testing or doesn’t show up at
all. Most of the test runners accessible from the 'Test
With...' in fact use stderr to communicate back to the
addin. This was
originally because I couldn’t count on the .NET Remoting
support in Mono and Rotor. It has also proven to be useful when checking that the
test runner process isn’t causing any side effects (in the
case of Test With… .NET 1.0 or 1.1). With this trace monitor code it looks like there
is a better way!