We find the root cause
of the problem

Preparing Your Application for Production and Customer Site using Instrumentation

A Three-day Workshop

Background

The responsibility for your software does not end when you send it out of the development team door. In many ways it is just the beginning of the application’s life in the real world, with teams of IT, Installation, Deployment, Support, Help desk end users and customers. It is not uncommon to find a 2 to 8 ratio in years of development to application usage.
A significant part of the total cost of an application’s life cycle is in maintenance and support.
Incorporating proper instrumentation in the application, during the design and development phases, significantly increases the ability of the support team to maintain the application in the field, as well as to identify and to solve problems quickly. In addition, the support team can collect and send relevant feedback to the development team, information that will enable the developers to locate and eliminate bugs faster and better.
Incorporating instrumentation in the software, takes very little design and development effort. On the other hand, it provides enormous savings in day to day maintenance costs and significantly reduces the down time required to locate and fix the root cause of failures and crashes.
The instrumentation infrastructure is integrated in the Microsoft Windows operating systems. It is widely used by Microsoft itself in its own operating system services and in its desktop products and is open and freely available to any software developer.
In our unique and practical workshop we will train your relevant personnel how to incorporate the instrumentation infrastructure in their products.
The workshop is based on field experience and on original material gathered from different Microsoft sources.

Target Audience

Senior developers, Developer team leads, Developer managers, Product architects.

Pre-requisites

Basic knowledge in programming in native and managed code, Basic knowledge of the C language and basic knowledge of system APIs..

Main Topics:

Practical review of all the instrumentation infrastructure and tools in Microsoft’s operating systems. Using Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) infrastructure to trace and collect information from your application. Incorporating WMI in your application and incorporating it into the standard Windows management tools. Preparing your application for production debugging in the field. Making the application more ‘crash friendly’.

Incorporating different system event logging mechanisms in the application including detailed design considerations. When and how to incorporate Performance counters in application and its usage for monitoring and base lining. Connecting your application to Windows Error Reporting (WER). Configuring the operating system for maximum usable information-gathering in the event of failure. Tips, tricks and lessons from the field.