Dialogue In Visual Studio, you can get diagnostic data about applications you've already deployed by using the IntelliTrace ...

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In Visual Studio, you can get diagnostic data about applications you've already deployed by using the IntelliTrace standalone collector. Without changing your production environment configuration, you can install the collector where your application is deployed, use PowerShell commands to collect the data, and then delete the collector when you're done. This lets you record IntelliTrace information while your application runs without interrupting its operation. You can collect this data for Web applications and managed applications.

When you have the recording, you can open it in Visual Studio Ultimate, review the data, and use the IntelliTrace debugging experience to find out what happened. Let's show you how fast and easy this can be. 



Action
In the PowerShell session, run the get-help IntelliTrace command.
 
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The IntelliTrace collector comes with PowerShell commands that you use to collect data collection for an IIS application pool. You can see other commands that help you work with IntelliTrace recordings and IIS. 

Let's look at a recording we saved from the Fabrikam Fiber Web application. Recordings are stored as .iTrace files.



Action
Show the .iTrace file and double-click it. 
 
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The recording opens in Visual Studio Ultimate, and you see the IntelliTrace Summary page. This page shows exceptions, Web requests, threads, and other information that IntelliTrace collected. 



Action
Expand the Exception Data section.
 
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In this section, you can see exceptions that were caught and thrown while IntelliTrace was recording.



Action
Expand the Web Requests section. 

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In this section, you can see Web requests that were submitted to IIS. 


 
Action
Double-click a Web request. 

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Examining a Web request shows you more details about it and all the IntelliTrace events that occurred when the request was processed. You can start debugging from an event.



Action
Select an ADO.NET event and start debugging.
 
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You can now see the same information as when you debug an application with IntelliTrace in Visual Studio. When you start debugging from an event, Visual Studio takes you to the code where the event occurred.  This is the same debugging experience you get when you press F5.

As we've shown, you can collect debugging data about deployed applications without changing their production environment. You can use IntelliTrace with this information to find and resolve bugs easier and faster.