C# Dynamic Code Analysis

Question

Hi,

I'm wondering if there are tools, or if there is a programmatic approach for mapping the execution of a web application ?

To clarify, the company I work for develop a CRM product that is based around the concept of Dynamically loading ASCX controls on a page-by-page basis.

What I would like to see is a map to see from the request start, to the page render, which classes are instantiated and which methods are entered; seeing the arguments that are passed along too would be good.

I know in my heart that we have some serious cyclomatic complexity problems and I want to be able to generate a graph or something that I can put in-front of my development manager and say, here - now please let me fix it!

I've seen the Code metrics plugin for reflector, and of course NDepend, but I need something that will attach to a live process, even if I need to decorate with attributes. That way I can see the different execution depending on what page and what modules are loaded.

I'd be grateful for any advice!

Answer 1

Are you doing this for debugging purposes? You could turn the built in trace on, by adding trace="true" in the @Page declarative in your aspx (or in web.config, for the entire app), and then see this detailed information as you load the page.

Answer 2

try to use AntsProfiler

Answer 3

Try dotTrace

Answer 4

Turns out that PostSharp was the best fit for this problem. It's default example of weaving a Trace into every method in this voluminous assembly gave me the output I was after.

Thanks to everyone for their input though, it was nice to see at least that Ants has grown a lot since I tried it last; it appears to pick up our dynamically loaded user controls now!