DevTracer – Trace Monitor for Microsoft® Windows Phone 7

DevTracer is a trace monitor for logging and debugging applications. It supports software developers and testers to find bugs and, even more important, it can help to identify the cause of bugs. It supports all development environments which support COM (Component Object Model) or the Microsoft .NET platform.

Windows Phone 7 has very limited support for tracing. There is the class Debug in namspace System.Diagnostics, but this method sends the trace information to the output window of Visual Studio, and only displays the information when the software is run in debug mode. Of course the phone needs to be connected to the devoping machine.

With DevTracer it is possible use tracing without Visual Studio. Because trace information is transmitted using TCP/IP, Wireless LAN can be used to send the information. It is even possible to use the phone's data connection (GSM, EDGE...) to transmit the data. And it is not limited to a debug version.

To make DevTracer work with Windows Phone 7 you need a very simple Web Service with one method which needs to be hosted on your developer machine, and a helper class for Windows Phone with methods calling this Web Service. Information and an implementation of this service and the helper class can be found at Using DevTracer with Microsoft® Windows Phone 7 Apps and Silverlight.

More information about DevTracer in general is available here . Download the free trial version on our download page. You can use it for 30 days. The trial version has all features of the full version.