Version 8.1
Integration with Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server-DevPartner Studio extends the capability and value of Visual Studio Team System with the most advanced diagnostics, distributed analysis capabilities and work item integration with Team Foundation Server. Now you can submit defect work items from DevPartner Studio directly to Team Foundation Server. Work item integration allows DevPartner Studio users to collaborate more effectively. Testers and developers can communicate detailed diagnostic data with one another in a Team System environment. Better collaboration and timely data result in faster resolution of defects to keep application development projects on schedule.
New System Snapshot SDK with royalty-free redistribution-Now you can enable your applications to take customized system-level snapshots on demand. Snapshots from your QA systems, production systems or customer systems can be automatically analyzed on your DevPartner System Comparison client to quickly identify configuration issues that cause your application to fail or become unstable.
New Code Review rules. Enhanced support for .NET coding standards and best practices with 21 new Code Review rules.
Improved support for Code Review customized rules. Learn how to create your own rules more easily with functional, customizable rule examples and supporting documentation.
Code Review exclusion capability. Now you can streamline and accelerate your Code Review sessions by excluding code that you do not want to analyze.
Improved support for automated Code Review sessions. New return codes signal your batch process when Code Review errors have been found. Now your nightly build process can do intelligent branching based on Code Review results.
Version 8.0
System Comparison Utility
DevPartner Studio supplies a Comparison Utility that takes snapshots of machine configurations, registry settings, system services, drivers, installed products, and so on. Two snapshots can be compared and the differences reported. These snapshots can be from the same system or from different systems. This feature can be can be invaluable when identifying differences in system configurations that may be causing an application to behave differently than expected.
Performance expert
Analyzes an application at run-time and locates problem methods in the code. It then allows developers to view details about individual lines in the method. This feature allows data collection on Disk I/O, Network I/O and synchronization wait time.
Fault Simulator SE
Developers can now quickly and safely simulate a useful set of location based .NET Framework faults to test their error handling code. Once an error has been simulated, developers can step through the error handling lines of code to diagnose and correct the bugs.
Version 7.2
Static source code analysis support for .NET naming conventions
Developers can ensure that their method and variable names use the naming conventions as put forth in the Microsoft .NET Framework General Reference Naming Guidelines document. DevPartner code review will automatically check for appropriate names and flag anything that doesn't fit within those naming conventions.
Dead code detection in static source code analysis
Many applications end up with code that is ultimately never called. This code could be a source of errors and performance degradation, however, and makes the entire application more difficult to maintain.
DevPartner Studio Server license (Available separately)
DevPartner Studio continues to support the ability to collect, correlate and view performance, coverage and memory analysis data from remote machines. Developers can now follow transactions of distributed applications across multiple tiers through the DevPartner Studio Server license. The DevPartner Studio Server license replaced both the Performance and Coverage Remote Agent and the Distributed Analyzer remote agent.
Support for use with Microsoft Terminal Services
Developers can log in remotely using Terminal Services and use DevPartner Studio on the remote computer (requires concurrent user licenses). This grants developers the freedom to use a single copy of DevPartner Studio on one computer and to access that computer from home or while traveling. One can also use DevPartner Studio on a central lab computer from the user desktop, without having to walk to the computer lab and physically log in.
Additional functionality in DevPartner Studio:
- Full integration with Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio .NET 2003
- Support for Visual Studio 6 with integrated error detection using BoundsChecker technology
- Distributed multi-tier analysis and correlation
- Enhanced performance analysis for web services
- .NET memory, performance and coverage analysis
- Ability to display code call graphs
- Ability to compare two performance profiling runs for differences
- Supports concurrent license borrowing
Source Code Review
Keep code up to standards-by design
DevPartner Studio Professional Edition source code review comes tightly integrated with the Visual Studio .NET IDE, so you apply the right .NET standards and technologies consistently at every stage of development, even when working with various languages and multi-tiered components.
Choose DevPartner Studio predefined code review rules, or implement your own, to:
- review source code from multiple .NET languages, including C#, Visual Basic .NET and ASP .NET
- identify and analyze coding errors, inefficient instructions or inappropriate use of one or more languages within a .NET application, making sure code components work correctly separately and together
- examine calls to underlying services, proving the call is sound and applied in the proper context of the application
- build a model of the entire application to scan different code components in combination and evaluate how effectively .NET features are used.
Error Detection and Diagnosis
Catch and fix errors early
DevPartner Studio Professional Edition error detection catches problems with unsupportable code, runtime errors or mishandled exceptions in Visual Studio .NET, Visual C++ and Visual Basic code, as you develop. You address errors early in development, rather than at later stages when software defects are tougher to address and more costly to fix.
You view the code's call stack, highlight the issue you need to correct and DevPartner Studio instantly takes you to the line of code generating the error. Spot trouble across Windows operating systems and application tiers, even across multiple and already-running processes, as DevPartner Studio:
- identifies poor and nonstandard programming practices
- validates Windows API and system calls
- supports native-mode applications, including resource tracking and leak detection for static destructors, and provides operating system-specific knowledge of device contexts
- offers advanced support for Use Count analysis
- tracks transitions between managed and unmanaged code.
Memory Analysis
DevPartner Studio memory analysis shows you the amount of memory consumed by an object or class, tracks the references that are holding an object in memory, and identifies the lines of source code within a method responsible for allocating the memory. With an accurate profile of a program's memory usage, you can improve runtime performance and resource utilization by optimizing code that consumes or wastes the most memory. The memory profiler saves valuable development time by helping you quickly locate inefficient code that would otherwise take hours or days to find manually.
When you run DevPartner Studio memory analysis, you can choose to examine one of three important potential problem areas:
- memory leaks
- temporary object creation
- overall RAM footprint
DevPartner Studio memory analysis then delivers a host of detailed information:
- Real-time graph: a live, dynamic view of your application's memory use as it runs. You can see how much memory is being used by your application code, by the system and by other external application code, and how memory consumption compares to the memory reserved for the managed heap (memory).
- Dynamic list of classes: the list of profiled classes is updated in real time, showing you the number of objects allocated and number of bytes used by each class, as your application runs.
- Detailed heap views: a detailed view of the managed heap (memory) at any time during program execution. This data can be used to analyze memory problems in depth, allowing you to see how your application uses memory and ultimately identify the methods or lines of code responsible for the most memory use.
Memory analysis operates on any .NET application component including VB.NET, Managed Visual C++ and C#, as well as ASP.NET and JScript. Applications consisting of any combination of these languages can be analyzed on a single system for memory use, and the results are automatically correlated for easy viewing.
Code Coverage Analysis
Cover your .NET bases
No more relying on relatively subjective reports to test code. DevPartner Studio Professional Edition code coverage analysis tells you how much code was tested, how well it tested and what was never tested at all. You get the answers you need to focus testing where it's needed most, whether it's code check-in, unit testing, integration testing or final release. To zero-in on untested code for you, DevPartner Studio:
- captures and combines testing sessions for applications, components and web pages
- traces both .NET and native code across users, languages and application tiers
- pinpoints the portions of an application left unexecuted during one or more tests
- merges sessions to present a clear picture of testing progress over time.
With the optional DevPartner Studio Server license, you can extend the code coverage analysis capabilities included in DevPartner Studio to remote computers.
Performance Analysis
Pin down sources of bottlenecks in no time
DevPartner Studio performance analysis takes you where few profiling tools can go, to the individual line of source code to identify and analyze slow code and performance bottlenecks line by line. Using DevPartner Studio performance profiling, you can:
- profile Visual C++, Visual Basic, .NET, C#, VBScript and JScript code from top to bottom
- trace running applications and differentiate between application and operating system calls, all through an intuitive user interface
- isolate performance bottlenecks in single and multi-tiered applications at machine, process, component or source line levels
- receive recommendations and corrective actions from one key source-DevPartner Studio.
Interested in analyzing performance on multi-tiered applications running on multiple systems? With the optional DevPartner Studio Server license, you can achieve higher levels of performance and reliability.
Performance Expert
DevPartner Studio contains many features designed to assist application development, including a performance analyzer that helps you locate bottlenecks in your code. Performance Expert takes performance profiling a step further for managed code Visual Studio applications by providing deeper analysis of the following hard-to-solve problems:
- CPU/thread usage
- File/disk I/O
- Network I/O
- Synchronization wait time
Performance Expert analyzes your application at run-time and locates the problem methods in your code. It then allows you to view details about individual lines in the method, or to examine parent-child calling relationships to help you determine the best way to fix the problem.
When you have decided on an approach, Performance Expert enables you to jump directly to the problem lines in your source code, so you can quickly fix problems.
DevPartner Performance Expert is designed for use by software designers, software developers and quality assurance (QA) engineers. It can also be used by development management staff to identify problems in an ongoing project.
Fault Simulator SE
It is difficult and many times impossible to simulate .NET Framework call errors during the testing process, to verify the operation of the error handling code that has been written to deal with errors. DevPartner Studio provides an introductory-level capability to define error conditions for a sampling of localized .NET Framework calls, to then simulate that these errors have taken place in such a way as to only affect the application under test, and to collect useful information at the point of the error simulation including the current call stack and information on what error handling executed based on the error.
Using this feature, developers can quickly and safely simulate a useful set of .NET Framework error conditions in order to test their error handling code. Once an error has been simulated, the developer will typically use their normal debugging process including the use of the Visual Studio debugger in order to step through the error handling lines of code to verify correct operation and/or to diagnose and correct bugs.
System Comparison
DevPartner Studio supplies a Comparison Utility that takes snapshots of machine configurations, registry settings, system services, drivers, installed products, and so on. Two snapshots can be compared and the differences reported. These snapshots can be from the same system or from different systems. This feature can be can be invaluable when identifying differences in system configurations that may be causing an application to behave differently than expected.