Runtime Flow blog (Understanding a control flow in a running .NET application)

I’ve successfully tried Runtime Flow on two more applications – Logic Circuit and Cropper:

“We’ve inherited a very complex codebase and only 2 out of 6 members understand the flow in detail. How can we improve the groups knowledge, where do we start? We’re talking 10s of thousands of lines of code broken into 2 main projects. The code itself is difficult to understand, contains alot of Delegates which makes the Debugging a nightmare.” It is a very good example of the problem I want to solve (original message in Visual C# Forums). I was personally involved within a group inheriting 2 large projects in the last 2 years and I can attest that manually tracking control flow is very time consuming if sometimes possible at all.

Another example: “It became clear to us that there was a common pattern among all interviewees: The most painful and time consuming part of the development process wasn’t writing new code, but understanding existing one. In a large organization like Microsoft, source code moves across several developers, and sometimes they need to go back to what someone wrote few years ago to comprehend it and add a new feature. Without access to the person who originally wrote that code, it was a pain task.”

A solution that I’m working on is a real time function call monitoring. Like Process Monitor only for code and presenting the calls as a tree:

Clicking on a function in the tree navigates to its implementation in Visual Studio. Another way to describe the proposed solution is a use case based code navigation view.

I have a (slowly) working standalone prototype for monitoring .NET 2.0-3.5 32-bit desktop applications. The above screenshot was made for SurF File Manager written in C++/CLR. I plan to present a downloadable alpha with Visual Studio integration in a month.