Using intelligent Tracking (IntelliTrace) to peep into the clouds

This April, we released Visual Studio 2010 to the world. One of the many groundbreaking new features in Visual Studio 2010 is Intelligent tracing (IntelliTrace). Intelligent tracking allows us to debug the past state of the project. This plays an important role in solving the "inability to reproduce" situation that we often encounter. Customer feedback on this tool is also good.

And now, we want to announce that the June 2010 version of Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio has been officially released. For users of the visual Studio 2010 flagship, this version adds to the power of intelligent tracing for cloud services running on Windows Azure.

The past: limited visibility; now: Clear skies.

One of the challenges for developing applications on Windows Azure is visibility in the cloud. And the new debugging tools just happen to make you do it. In particular, the Integrated intelligent Tracing feature in Windows Azure tools enables you to debug problems that have occurred in cloud applications from your desktop.

Tell me what to do

To show you how the integrated intelligent tracking features in Windows Azure tools work, let's start by creating a new Windows Azure Cloud Services. Click on File | New Project | Windows Azure Cloud Services. Click and add a asp.net MVC Web role, and then click OK.

This new solution will work in the cloud. So now let's add an error to it. We'll use intelligent tracking to debug this error later.

In the MvcWebRole1 project, click and open the "References" node, the right mouse click SYSTEM.WEB.MVC, and select "Properties."

Set the Copy local (copy to native) property to False. This causes the application to not copy SYSTEM.WEB.MVC this dependent file when it is deployed, resulting in a load error when the application runs. We will use intelligent tracking to find and track this load error.

Now we can deploy our project to the cloud. Right-click the cloud Service item and select "Publish":