Opensource alternative to Azure Application Insights? - visual-studio

Application Insights has a great feature that can open an execption in Visual Studio and then debug with the current state of all the variables and objects.
I have been looking around for a open source alternative that can do the same, but I have not found anything similar. What I want to achive is quite simple. I want to dump all the state of my objects/variables when an exception occours, save it somewhere and then later on be able to load it into Visual Studio.
Any ideas how to achieve this?

Application Insights appears to be an Application Performance Monitoring tool.
These generally seem to be language/platform specific, but the best known open source alternative I could find is called insepctIT, which is for the Java ecosystem.
It appears that you can cobble together multiple tools to get the same job done in other ecosystems, OpenAPM seems to have a tool that lets you compare different pieces of the overall APM workflow and put together a monitoring solution for your app.
I realize this doesn't solve the specifics of your question related to debugging in Visual Studio, but it could help others that run across this question on google.

Related

What's the recommended tech to program Windows shell?

I am developing a small tool that can detecting which folders are being opened in windows explorer and bring it to front if a specific address has been opened.
I can use both C# and C++ and finally pick C# as it is easier than C++ to accomplish the same target. Then I googled the internet and knowing COM object SHDocVw.ShellWindows can help collect all windows being opened. Then I start looking for Microsoft document to see if any functions can help to achieve my other requirements. However, when I search shell related documents: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/desktop/legacy/ff521731(v=vs.85) I am warned that "We're no longer updating this content regularly. Check the Microsoft Product Lifecycle for information about how this product, service, technology, or API is supported." Moreover, some documents even say these techs will be deprecated in Win11 (See the following screenshot)
I am wondering what the status of these Shell related technical. If these are being deprecated. What's the alternative solution? I don't want my tool stop working when start using new Windows. Meanwhile, I am confusing in the study routine of learning Windows desktop technical. Looks like so many technical to achieve the same targets. Is there anyone can give me some road maps?
Last thing, it's really frustrating to search COM object documents at Microsoft sites. Is this tech going down?
Microsoft has been trying to kill win32/desktop applications since Windows 8. That parts of the documentation is labeled as "legacy" is not something I would worry too much about. Some of the shell functions have been marked as deprecated for 20 years but still work fine today and too many applications rely on them for Microsoft to successfully remove them.
The Internet Explorer warning is different and IE might actually go away but that does not affect IShellWindows which is also used by Explorer.exe and 3rd-party applications. Its implementation lives in a shell DLL and not in IE.

Sharing projects in visual studio

Hello again StackOverflow. I am getting back into developing in XNA/C# with a few buddies of mine across the states. I have setup a server on my computer, installed TFS and Sharepoint, but neither of these seems to have the exact solution that im looking for. I want to be able to share a project with multiple other people, and preferably at the same time be able to edit (dont know if this is possible, ive seen it done with HeroEngine and a few other programs) What is the best way to acheive this? I know I can set up a shared folder with the project in it, but I feel there are many faults to this as version control and overwriting other peoples work. What is the best solution for this?

File changed watcher Tool

I have recently begun a new project which runs on remote computer. I usually remote debug the application. I have setup microsoft sync toy to "echo" the built exe,dll,pdb and configs to the remote computer.
However, i cant add synctoy to my visual studio build events because it might disturb some of the other programmers in my team. I was wondering, which (free) tool would you guys use to watch a folder of files and kick off synctoy when a change is detected.
I can write a simple file watcher, but rather than reinvent the wheel, i would rather just use an existing tool. Searching on google yields so many tools, i wouldn't want to try them out just to find a good one.
It may fall under the banner of reinventing the wheel, but if you are using .NET, the FileSystemWatcher class, albeit without a UI, is pretty much as comprehensive as you can get, out of the box.
I'm sure you could knock something up with it in a very short time.
What about using Robocopy with the /MON or /MOT options? See http://ss64.com/nt/robocopy.html for more details.

Visual VoiceXML/VXML development tool?

Does anyone know of any tools out there that will let me run and debug a VXML application visually? There are a ton of VXML development tools, but they all require you to build your application within them.
I have an existing application that uses JSPs to generate VXML, and I'm looking for a way to navigate through and debug the rendered VXML in much the same way that Firebug allows one to do this with HTML. I have some proxy-like tools that let me inspect the rendered code as it is sent to the VXML browser, but there's a ton of JS, which makes traversing the code by hand rather difficult.
Has anyone worked with a product that allows for this?
Thanks!
IVR Avenger
There is JigSaw Test suite - has free trial license and reasonably priced.
There is IBM's debugger - part of WebSphere Voice Toolkit.
Many other products have debuggers - a very good summary is here
Disclaimer: I am the development manager for Voiyager (www.voiyager.com), a VoiceXML testing tool. It doesn't meet your criteria nor do I believe it is the type of tool you want, but I thought it was worth mentioning it.
As far as I know, there isn't such a test tool for VoiceXML. In fact there are very few VoiceXML tools on the market and hardly any of them test or analysis. The vendors that created development tools, have all been acquired by other companies. Some of them offered did offer various forms of debugging that were specific to their tool set or stayed at the Dialog (caller input) level. From your question, I'm assuming you need much lower level debugging capabilities.
I think the alternative paths are minimal and somewhat difficult. I believe your primary goal is to debug or rewrite an existing application, but you haven't provided any specific challenges beyond the JavaScript. Some thoughts or approaches that may help:
Isolate the JavaScript and place the code into a unit test harness. That will go a long way to understanding the logic of the application. Any encapsulation of the JavaScript you perform will probably go a long way towards better code maintainability.
Attempt to run the VoiceXML through a translation layer to HTML so you could use FireBug. The largest challenge would involve caller input (ie processing the SRGS grammars). You could probably cheat this by just having the form accept a JSON string the populates the field values. There are tools on the market to test grammars. Depending on the nature of your problems, you could take a simple and light approach and attempt this over just the trouble areas.
Plumb the application with a lot of logging. This can be done through the VoiceXML LOG element, or push the variable space back to the server. By adding intermediate forms, you may be able to provide a dump from each via the VoiceXML Data element.
See if your application will run in one of the open source VoiceXML browsers (not sure of the state of the open source browsers as we've built and bought for our various product lines). If you can get it mostly working, you can use the development debugger to provide some ability to step through the logic. However, it is probably one of the more difficult paths as you'll really need to understand the browser to know when and where to stick your breakpoints and to figure out how to expose the data you want.
Good luck on the challenge. If you find another approach, I would be interested in seeing it posted.
An alternative debug env is to use something like Asterisk with a voicexml browser plugin like the one from http://www.voiceglue.org/ or for a limited licence, i6net.
You can keep all the pieces separate(dynamic html and vxml application in php/jsp/j2ee/, tts processing, and optional asr processing as separate virtual machines with something like virtualbox. If the logic can be kept the same, then it is just a matter of changing the UI based on the channel.
A softphone is all you need to call a minimal asterisk machine, which has the voicexml browser with the url of the vxml in the call plan.
I just used Zend Framework as php is used in this environment, and changed view suffixes(phtml vs vxml) based on the user-agent string.
Flite for tts is fine for debugging, and when your app is ready you can either record phrases, and there was a page on the ubuntu forums with directions for how to increase flite quality with some additional sound files.
Do you have tried Eclipse VTP or InVision Studio?
Eclipse VTP
This is Eclipse plugin. But I feel that it is user-unfriendly a little (of Japanese viewpoint).
InVision Studio *Required create user account*
This is Convergys's IVR tool. It has to edit standard VXML mode. (Unfortunately, It's not exact matching.)
For just debugging vxml, I use Nuance Cafe's VoiceXML checker. It doesn't give you a visual tree or anything, but it's pretty good at spotting syntax errors and is free. I think they might also have more advanced debugging tools if you look into it, but I haven't had the need. (Note: I have no association with them)
http://cafe.bevocal.com/tools/vxmlchecker/vxmlchecker.jsp
I'm looking for the same problem that most of the links are down. I found a document where they propose an open source solution, which works as a plugin for Asterisk (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228873959_Open_Source_VoiceXML_Interpreter_over_Asterisk_for_Use_in_IVR_Applications) and is available at https://sourceforge.net/projects/voxy/
I would like to know if there are current options to create a VXML structure graphically, like the next image.

Whirlwind tour of Eclipse?

Does anyone know of a whirlwind tour of Eclipse that would help a (former) Visual Studio user get up to speed with it?
I just want something that tells me where all the basic features are and what all the cool stuff I've heard so much about is?
So far I've been using it mostly as a text editor and have had some luck compiling and running programs in it. But... I'm a bit confused, for instance sometimes I can't seem to get out of debug mode.
I'me sure I'm just looking in the wrong places for everything as I'm used to a different interface.
Are there plugins for Eclipse that make it look and feel more like Visual Studio?
I'm using Europa at the moment because thats what the rest of my team use, howver I'm more than happy to migrate to Ganemede...
Try Help -> Help Contents (no joke) and read the Workbench User Guide:
Especially the Chapter Concepts.
The same chapter is also very well in the Java Development User Guide
I'm sure after reading these few pages, you'll already know more then the average Eclipse user (because needs Help this days?).
Try http://help.eclipse.org/help32/index.jsp?topic=/org.eclipse.platform.doc.user/concepts/welcome.htm if you can't access the help directly from Eclipse.
Also IBM have an Introduction to Eclipse for Visual Studio users (although I've never used visual studio so I can't gauge it's usefulness).

Resources