Popular Articles

The following popular SmartInspect articles provide useful details to SmartInspect users, developers and third-party tool providers.

• Debugging Multi-Threaded Applications with SmartInspect Popular
  Presents and describes several techniques that assist in debugging and monitoring multi-threaded applications using SmartInspect. Furthermore it compares SmartInspect with traditional debuggers in terms of multi-threaded applications.
• Extending and Customizing the SmartInspect Libraries Popular
  Describes the techniques and common practices to extend and customize the SmartInspect libraries. It explains the sending of custom data and how to use events to customize the logging behavior.
• Integrating SmartInspect and Eurekalog Popular
  Demonstrates how to combine and benefit from both the advanced logging capabilities of SmartInspect to log application data and user actions, and from the excellent crash reporting capabilities of EurekaLog to receive exception and crash information from end-users via email and web.
• SmartInspect Log Formats and Protocols Popular
  Describes the internal SmartInspect log formats and protocols. This knowledge enables advanced SmartInspect users and third-party vendors to build additional SmartInspect compatible libraries and tools. Whenever a format or protocol changes, this article will be updated to reflect the changes.
• SmartInspect Logging Performance and Benchmarks Popular
  Provides performance analysis and benchmark results for the SmartInspect logging libraries. This information is useful for customers who want to use SmartInspect in highly scalable environments and on performance-critical production systems.
• Using Custom Protocols with the SmartInspect Libraries Popular
  Beginning with SmartInspect 2.0, the SmartInspect libraries provide the functionality to register and use your own custom protocols. This article introduces the basic concepts and provides a working implementation of a protocol which is capable of sending the logging data via email.

Articles on our Blog

From time to time we also publish SmartInspect-related articles on our blog. Here is a selection of the most popular blog postings:

• WCF logging and tracing with SmartInspect June 4th, 2010
  Distributed software applications are usually difficult to debug. Bugs and performance issues can occur on the client, on the server or in the communication stack. Finding the root cause of such problems is often not trivial, especially if the issue only occurs on a production system. Luckily, .NET ..
• Aspect-oriented logging for .NET with Unity and SmartInspect May 31st, 2010
  This article is part of a series about aspect-oriented logging with SmartInspect, our logging tool for .NET, Java and Delphi. Please see the first article of this series for a complete overview of the available posts.Michael Baarz recently emailed us as he was a looking for a modern .NET logging too..

New Articles

Please see below for the latest in-depth articles directly from the SmartInspect development team:

• Writing a Custom Log4j Appender for SmartInspect New
  Explains how to integrate SmartInspect with log4j by writing and using a custom log4j appender. Two different ways of integration both tools are explained in this article and a ready-to-use log4j appender is provided.
• Using a Custom Log4net Appender with SmartInspect New
  The easiest way to use SmartInspect with an application that makes heavy use of log4net is to use a custom log4net appender to integrate both logging solutions. This article explains the available options for integrating both tools and presents a ready-to-use custom log4net appender.

Other Technical Articles

The following in-depth articles by the SmartInspect development team highlight specific product usages, demonstrate advanced features and introduce best practices.

• Adding Encryption Support to the SmartInspect Libraries
  One of the great features of the SmartInspect libraries is their flexibility. This article shows how to implement a custom protocol on top of the existing file protocol which adds support for encrypting log files.
• Exploring the Backlog Functionality of the SmartInspect Libraries
  Demonstrates and explains the backlog functionality and its related features of the SmartInspect libraries introduced in version 2.0. With the new backlog feature, the SmartInspect libraries are capable of managing a packet queue and flushing it with a specified trigger.
• Implementing a Simple Server for the SmartInspect Libraries
  Demonstrates and explains a simple server which is capable of receiving logs via TCP/IP from the SmartInspect libraries and storing them in log files for later access. Useful as a guide for developers who want to know more about the internals of SmartInspect.
• Improving .NET Trace and Debug with SmartInspect
  Presents a technique to improve the logging output of the .NET Trace and Debug classes of the System.Diagnostics namespace. It does so without the need to change existing log statements, thus allowing you to reuse your existing logging layer and extending it with the features of SmartInspect.
• Improving Unit Testing with SmartInspect
  Describes techniques to improve unit testing and creating logs for unit tests. It explains the generating of log reports which are useful for analyzing and understanding the execution flow of your unit tests.
• Using SmartInspect Logging in Delphi Dlls
  Describes the SmartInspect way to add logging to your Delphi Dlls. It explains the configuration and integration of the SmartInspect Delphi library to add monitoring and tracing capabilities to Dlls written in Delphi.