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This is what I need: http://www.replaysolutions.com/ Unfortunately, according to this New York Times article, it comes with a $50,000 per project price tag. Ouch! http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/23/technology/23proto.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=game+software+bugs&st=nyt&oref=slogin. / comments

This is what I need: http://www.replaysolutions.com/ Unfortunately, according to this New York Times article, it comes with a $50,000 per project price tag. Ouch!http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/23...

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Scenario #1 Timers I have some code that has two timers. They start in response to mouse movements. It is not possible to single step through the code to see what is happening. I have to form a mental model of the process, define hypotheses about the behavior I'm observing, then instrument the code to see if my hypotheses are correct. It can be enormously time consuming. An execution trace would let me see what actually happened and eliminate a lot of the trial and error. Scenario #2 Hidden side effects in generated code I recently burned a lot of hours isolating a bug that was occurring at a seemingly unrelated line. The line set a value in a DataRow. When I touched the data row, the data set was creating a new row, causing unexpected behavior in a grid. Commenting out the offending line only caused the problem to move to the next line that touched the data row. The code that was executing was hidden from the debugger because it was generated code (with a DebuggerNonUserCode attribute). An execution trace would have let me see that a new row was being created as a side effect of touching the data row--and that side effect was moving as I commented out the lines. Scenario #3 Deferred detection of symptoms Yesterday, I found an unexected line of test code that was refetching a data set. It was in a three line routine that should not have had anything to do with the problem. Since the effects were not felt until much later, I kept stepping right past it. If I had realized what was happening it would have been easy to find, but all I was seeing was that the data row associated with my grid row was magically null several levels up the call stack. Since I didn't know what was happening, I kept asking the wrong question and kept getting misleading answers. I needed a way to look at the execution from a high level and see where something unexpected was happening. Instead, it took three days, and four developers to isolate it. An execution trace would have shown me that something huge was happening as a side effect of calling that little routine. Writing sample code to demonstrate these kinds of problems is not possible. By definition, these problems are hard to isolate because they exist in complex scenarios, where the code may have been poorly constructed and is probably not well understood. Just like a class diagram can make it easier to understand the structure of the code base, a graphical execution trace could make it easier to find unexpected behavior. / comments

Scenario #1 Timers I have some code that has two timers. They start in response to mouse movements. It is not possible to single step through the code to see what is happening. I have to form a me...

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What I need is unrelated to web pages. I was focusing on the first line of the original post: I am interested in knowing the order of function calls and events. I am describing is new functionality that (I think) could be easily added to the profiler. I need a tool that is similar to a profiler, in that it monitors execution, but instead of telling me how long each line takes to execute, it shows what lines were executed. I'm not talking about code coverage. I don't want statistics. I want to see stuff that single stepping can't easily catch. Imagine adding a trace statement to every line of code in the application, then turning trace log into a report that shows what happened--as shown in the flash demo in my previous post. The tool would help to debug code that contains timers or properties that produce unexpected side-effects. / comments

What I need is unrelated to web pages. I was focusing on the first line of the original post: I am interested in knowing the order of function calls and events. I am describing is new functional...

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I am looking for the same thing... except at a more detailed level. Every now and then, it would be very helpful to get an execution trace instead of having to single step through a million lines of code. Instrumenting the code manually is too laborious and too invasive. I may not have the source code anyway. An internet search turned up one product that almost does what I want. http://www.sparxsystems.com/resources/demos/debuggingcs/debuggingcs.swf The last 30 seconds show an execution trace diagram. I have not used their product, but it looks like it works at the method level only. The ability to drill down to individual lines is ABSOLUTELY CRITICAL, since the reason I need the tool is to find unexpected side-effects. For example: Setting a value in a DataRow object can result in a new DataRow being created--producing mystifying results. You can see it happen if you configure the debugger not to skip generated code and then single step very carefully, but you're going to take a long time finding it. An comprehensive execution trace could identify these side-effect type problems much more easily. / comments

I am looking for the same thing... except at a more detailed level. Every now and then, it would be very helpful to get an execution trace instead of having to single step through a million lines o...

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