At a previous job I was on, we made pretty heavy use of a tracer class that was really helpful for debugging and performance tuning. By injecting some trace commands in your code at the beginning and end of operations that you wanted to analyze, and flipping a switch in the application config file, the tool would generate a nice, indented/formatted output to your Visual Studio output window that would give you a nice, easy way to see exactly what was going on in your code at runtime. Since I left that job, on several occasions I’ve thought how nice it would be to have something like that available to use again.

I recently downloaded and installed a nice little utility that I’ve used off-and-on for a long time now called the Snippet Compiler by Jeff Key. That guy just cranks stuff out left and right. He’s got all kinds of little time-saving utilities for monotonous tasks that a lot of developers do all the time. So, after I downloaded the Snippet Compiler (recommended), I was browsing through all of the other stuff that he had, and lo and behold, he has a tracer assembly available for download. From the looks of his write-up on it, it looks to be just like the one I’d used previously, only better…as it looks to output even more details about what’s going on in the code. Very, very nice. And of course, like most of his other utilities, its free and source code is provided in case you want to see how it works or do any tweaking to suit your own needs. Thanks Jeff. Keep up the great work.