Misc SmartInspect 3.0 Library Improvements

There are many smaller improvements in the SmartInspect libraries that don’t warrant their own blog postings. Here are a few of those features at a glance:

• Reconnect Interval
  The new reconnect interval protocol option allows you to configure how often the library should try to (re-)establish a connection. This allows you to specify, for example, that SmartInspect should only retry to establish a failed TCP/IP connection every 5 minutes.

• File Buffering
  SmartInspect usually doesn’t use any buffers when writing data to log files. We do this to make sure that all log entries have been written in case of an application crash. However, in some situations performance is more important than guaranteeing that all log entries are written. For these cases, SmartInspect 3.0 comes with a new configurable buffer option to make the file protocol even faster.

• Named Checkpoints
  The existing checkpoint feature of SmartInspect is already quite useful. Basically, if you call the AddCheckpoint method of a SmartInspect library, it increments an internal counter and logs a message. This allows you to easily track how often a loop is executed or how often a specific method is called. The new named checkpoint feature enables you to have multiple counters at the same time and also to assign them a name to display in the Console.

• Delphi IDE Plugin
  Not exactly a new feature (the instrumenter has been available as a beta version from our site for quite some time now), but the Delphi IDE Plugin is now integrated with the SmartInspect setup and is fully supported by us. The Delphi IDE Plugin enables you to automatically add Enter- and LeaveMethod calls to your Delphi code. We did a video of the instrumenter when the first beta was released.

• Timer Calibration
  SmartInspect comes with high-resolution timers to measure log entries in micro seconds. This is very useful for profiling your application and for finding bottlenecks. To make the timers work reliable over multiple processes (ie., so that all processes use the same base time), SmartInspect comes with a new calibration method to synchronize the time.

Next (and the last post on new SmartInspect 3.0 features): redesigned log file rotation.