To make configuration files more useful in production environments, we added a new feature to SmartInspect 3.0 that allows you to periodically reload changes in your configuration file. Here is how it works: you create an instance of a new SmartInspect monitoring class and use it to watch for changes in a configuration file in a given time interval. Once this class detects that the monitored configuration file has been changed, it will automatically reload the file and apply the new configuration to the SmartInspect logging classes.

This is really great for systems where you want to enable or disable logging on the fly without restarting them (think about web applications and similar server systems). With the new configuration file monitoring class, this has become a lot easier. You just need to change the configuration file and SmartInspect will automatically reconfigure itself.

Also, remember the session configuration support in yesterday’s posting? By combining this with the configuration file monitoring, SmartInspect 3.0 will also allow you to dynamically configure and update your sessions. One interesting use case of this feature is to temporarily enable logging for a specific application module or user session that you want to diagnose.

Next in our series on new SmartInspect 3.0 features is the new protocol support for asynchronously logging.

The first improvement I would like to write about is actually not a new feature. It’s more like a set of several enhancements to the existing SmartInspect session concept. Back then in 2003 and 2004 when we first planned which features SmartInspect 1.0 should shave, we quickly agreed that we should provide users with a way to group and categorize related log messages. We have chosen the session concept because it’s a) easy to understand and b) maps very well to existing related concepts such as user sessions in web applications.

In retrospect we are happy that we went with sessions for two reasons. First, sessions turned out to be one the key features of SmartInspect. Although sessions are a somewhat advanced feature that new users often ignore (which they easily can, because they don’t have to care about it when they are learning SmartInspect). But once they are getting used to it and are using SmartInspect in more complex applications, they quickly see the advantages of sessions over other logging concepts.

The second point is a bit more technical. Since the entire library design relies on sessions, it would have been difficult to integrate sessions at a later point without breaking existing customer code. And because you should be very careful to not break existing customer code with a new version of a dev tool, we are glad that we got the basic library design mostly right in the first attempt.

Although we got most of the design right, there were a few missing features. The first new feature in SmartInspect 3.0 regarding sessions is the new log level support. This is probably the most often requested session related feature that we incorporated into the new version. Log level support for sessions means that you are now able to configure log levels on a per-session basis. This allows you, for example, to only log errors and warnings in your application, except for your database module where you want SmartInspect to generate a very detailed log (e.g., for debugging or auditing purposes).

Another improvement in SmartInspect 3.0 is the new ability to configure sessions via SmartInspect configuration files. This allows you to enable, disable or configure specific sessions without recompiling your application. This can come in very handy if you have to dynamically enable or disable logging for certain application modules on production systems or at customer sites.

The last new session enhancement is the support for so-called session defaults. Session defaults let you specify default values for session attributes like the Active status or the background color of log entries in the Console. This is very useful in situations where you are working with many sessions and need a way to change the base settings of all instances.

We will introduce other new features and improvements of SmartInspect 3.0 in the next few days here on our blog.

As you might already know, SmartInspect already fully supports Unicode and porting SmartInspect to Tiburon was quite easy and took only a few days of work overall. The SmartInspect Delphi library is now using UnicodeString as the main string type instead of WideString. Porting the library to UnicodeString had a positive impact on the performance of our logging library as the new UnicodeString is reference counted (and WideString is not). The performance gain is about 10-15%, but we do not have final numbers yet.

We are happy to see that Delphi will finally be 100% Unicodified soon, too, as this makes it really easy to build applications for an international audience. We fully expect to be releasing support for Tiburon and UnicodeString with SmartInspect just a few days after the new Delphi version goes gold.

The SmartInspect Router is a Windows service application which can receive SmartInspect log packets via TCP/IP or named pipes and routes them to different log destinations. The supported log destinations are the same as those from the SmartInspect libraries, namely log files, TCP/IP or named pipes. Two typical uses of the SmartInspect Router are to combine multiple client logs into a single log file and to collect logs in a central location. The SmartInspect Router is intended to provide a common logging infrastructure for distributed systems, multi-process applications and web applications.

Since SmartInspect is used more and more for web applications and distributed systems it became clear that we needed a server application that can receive logs via TCP/IP or named pipes and stores them in a central location. Many customers have expressed their need for such a solution.

We began work on the SmartInspect Router a few months ago and are happy to finally release the first version in this EAP. After installing the new EAP version, you can find the setup of the SmartInspect Router in the deploy directory of your SmartInspect EAP installation. The SmartInspect Router can be configured with a simple XML configuration file (please see the included help for details).

Releasing a completely new application is always a challenge and there might be a few things that don’t work correctly. If you encounter a problem with the SmartInspect Router, we would appreciate a comment in our SmartInspect EAP forum.

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I would also love to hear from other MicroISVs or Delphi developers who are twittering. Just leave a comment, follow me on twitter or email me. Thanks!

• Adapter class for Linq to SQL query logging (.NET only)
• SmartInspect Delphi IDE Plugin with code instrumenter
• New maxparts option for log file rotation
• Redesigned log rotation (log files rotated by size now also include the time stamp, for example)
• Added Browse History dialog to the Console

We also fixed and improved a couple of other things in this release. Please take a look at the release notes in the online help for a complete list of changes. Please provide feedback about this release in our forums or via email.

“I’m writing to tell you how pleased I am with SmartInspect. I had a nasty bug in one of my Windows Service programs. The service was silently aborting, even though the exact same codebase ran fine as a stand-alone application. I tried doing some logging of my own to text files, but I still could not find the problem.”

“After about a week of this nonsense I purchased SmartInspect. I spent maybe 40 minutes adding SmartInspect logging throughout my code, and 5 minutes after SmartInspect produced its first log file, I had the problem solved!”

“I don’t think I ever would have figured this out without SmartInspect. Thanks for a great product.”

Thanks a lot Kevin! It’s really great to hear how SmartInspect is helping customers to solve real-world problems. Did you have a similar experience with SmartInspect? We would love to hear from you.

1. In the Details toolbox (F7), you can see the time difference, time offset and timestamp of a log entry as well as the elapsed time between multiple log entries
2. Use / and * on your keyboard to recursively collapse and expand log entries in the views
3. Use <tab> and <shift+tab> to quickly switch between multiple views
4. You can easily reorganize your views and categories in the View Categories toolbox with drag and drop
5. Double-click on the status bar panels to quickly edit the related options (AutoView rules as well as TCP options)
6. Right-click on the status bar panels to open context-sensitive menus
7. Press <Ctrl+-> to reset the indentation level of the log entries of the current view
8. Double-click on an item in the Call Stack toolbox to quickly jump to the related log entry in the current view
9. Double-click on a thread in the ProcessFlow toolbox to create a new view for that thread
10. Hovering the mouse cursor over a data point in the Watches Graph shows the exact details of the watch entry

I hope this was useful! We will soon publish a list with 10 not so well-known features of the SmartInspect libraries, too.

We created a few link buttons so you can show your website visitors that you use SmartInspect to test and verify your software. Feel free to use these images on your website, in your online help and in other materials. You can download the link buttons from My Gurock.com, our customer portal.