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113

answers:

6

It occurs pretty often that I start debugging a class by logging every function call to console and looking for differences in the bugged cases. Is there some attribute that I can apply to a class to enable such a tracing? It's pretty exhausting to have to enter these

Console.WriteLine("classname: methodname")

to every method and to remove them afterwards (removing can be done by conditional compilation, but it is not very nice to look at the code when you have all this redundance)

+5  A: 

There was an add-on tool someone mentioned to me, using Attributes. Let's see if I can find it.

I think it was PostSharp:

Article

http://www.postsharp.org/

StampedeXV
+1  A: 

If log4net is as good as log4j, then you are all set

http://logging.apache.org/log4net//index.html

Zoidberg
A: 

In the dim dark ages of software engineering, one often used a profiling tool to achieve that since profiling injected extra code at entry and exit of all functions, although I must say that this is a pretty dismal approach to debugging and when I used it, it was a desperation move not front line. Debugging by print statement is fairly slow and ineffective.

plinth
It gives you some information about the flow of the program. Effectiveness depends on the problem.
Etan
+3  A: 

You can use PostSharp to intercept all method calls and print them even with all arguments and it does not require source code changes. This CodeProject article shows how to do logging with PostSharp.

Just to note, PostSharp is an aspect-oriented programming (AOP) framework and there are some more.

Daniel Brückner
A: 

A similar question was asked sometime back on stackoverflow. Answers for that question might look interesting to you.

Aseem Bansal
A: 

AOP is supported also by http://www.springframework.net/

Jan Suvak