Compuware Boosts .Net Platform

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If Microsoft Corp.s Visual Studio .Net doesnt already give a developer enough knobs to turn and buttons to push, Compuware Corp.s DevPartner Studio Professional Edition 7.1 should fill the bill nicely with its extensive array of coding quality assurance aids that are aimed at the new opportunities—and challenges—of the .Net platform.

Released this fall at $1,495, the product lives up to the Compuware tradition of complete integration into the Microsoft development environment. We admit to holding our breath during installation. VS .Net is so hellaciously complex that adding yet another suite of more than mildly invasive tools seems a lot like adding another lobe to a persons brain, with the patient awake during the process. We were impressed, however, by the results. DevPartner menus, help and tool icons simply appeared in the proper places as if they had been there all along.

Even so, developers should not expect to understand immediately what they see. The DevPartner Studio Quick Reference “card” is 28 full pages of tool bar descriptions, command-line options, report and graph taxonomies, and keyboard shortcut lists. None of this is especially hard to learn, but there are steps that need to be performed in sequence to enable functions such as memory analysis and to yield useful data from test runs. Indeed, developers will get much more from this package if they dedicate some time to mastering its procedures.

When experienced C++ developers make the move to .Net, that frameworks active role in managing memory is probably among the biggest paradigm shifts. These developers will get particular benefit from the memory analysis features introduced in this release of DevPartner Studio, especially the temporary object analysis that tracks object allocations based on size and on time before resource recovery.

Also important to .Net development is a good understanding of the calling relationships among application components, which DevPartner aided us in examining with diagrams that we could navigate to get additional performance and calling information.

When applications yield disappointing performance, its often the case that a single, often-used function or a single coding decision is creating most of the problem. We found DevPartners tools and displays well-suited to the task of rooting out those problem areas, and we especially appreciated the performance profile comparison tools that let us quickly determine the effects of changes as we made them.

Working in distributed environments that include remote computing resources with variable response times, its essential for developers to take advantage of multithreaded approaches to maintain perceived performance in interactive tasks. DevPartner Studio 7.1 gives developers valuable help in identifying the tricky problems that can come with multithreaded designs, detecting and warning of possible deadlocks when threads are waiting for one another or when contention for resources leaves multiple threads unable to proceed.

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