What are those prizes in the race? - Part 2

Next up in the list of pizes for the race to be evaluated is SmartInspect. I must be honest here: I'm a CodeSite user and quite satisfied. My evaluation will inevatably be influenced by my CodeSite experiences and there will be a couple of comparisions. This is my second easiest evaluation because I already know the concepts from CodeSite.

Installing
Installing was like it should be: no hassle and flawless. SmartInspect can be used in Delphi, Visual Studio and Java. I've only looked at the Delphi implementation: I guess VS and Java implementations will be compareble.

Using SmartInspect
Basically SmartInspect is an advanced logging tool. You start a session, send out information and that is caught by either a server, a file or in memory. When logging to a server (which is built in into the viewer) the logging information is displayed live while running your program. When logging to a file, you can later view the file with a viewer.

You can of course log a simple string, but more usefull things can be done. You can log objects, the properties of which are available in the viewer. You can log images, stacks traces, system memory information, a screendump of the current window or the desktop window. There's a lot too choose from.

For more advanced debugging tracing methods/functions can be quite helpfull. Now, it basically is a minor thing, but I found the TrackMethod statements vary valuable. The working is comparable to the EnterMethod/LeaveMethod combination. But, EnterMethod/LeaveMethod must be used in pairs. And that means you best add a try/finally construction to your code to make sure the LeaveMethod is executed alwas.

TrackMethod however works with an interface and relies on the reference counting of the interface. This means you only need to add one call at the beginning of amethod/function to track it. There's no need for the try/finally construction. To me, that is a good thing because it won't clutter the readabilty of your code as much. Nice.

The console
Until now CodeSite and SmartInspect are about equal. The only real difference I found was the TrackMethods in SmartInspect, but CodeSite has functionallity to log to the windows event logs. So, the scores are equal at half time. But the real difference is in the console. While the CodeSite viewer isn't bad at all and gives you good possibilities to view and filter log messages, I think SmartInspect wins on points in that department. You have various viewers (a watch pane, some detail panes) for information from you log file. There's plenty to filter and various ways of finding specific information in your log file.

Conclusion
SmartInspect is just a very good product. From experience I can tell you that having these kinds of logging capabilities out of the box helps you to debug your software immensely. I couldn't program without them anymore. CodeSite and SmartInspect are comparable products with (about) equal prices. Download the trial versions to see what's your favourite.

Bye,
Bart