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Viewing software under the hood at runtime

kedinikkedinik Registered User regular
edited February 2010 in Help / Advice Forum
I'm looking for a development environment that will allow me to:

1) Build and run a program
2) View all the class definitions, variables, function calls, etc, that exist at runtime.

I believe that there may be a .NET solution for me, where all the existing objects in the primary program self-describe themselves to a secondary program, but I haven't been able to find it.

kedinik on

Posts

  • khainkhain Registered User regular
    edited February 2010
    You can do this with Visual Studio for the languages that it supports, I believe Eclipse has this capability for Java and potentially other languages if someone has written an extension. As a note for this to work you normally need to build the program with the tool in question and may have to do so in a special debug mode.

    khain on
  • KakodaimonosKakodaimonos Code fondler Helping the 1% get richerRegistered User regular
    edited February 2010
    Voila...

    .Net Reflector

    If you install with Visual Studio, you'll be able to even set breakpoints and step into the assemblies that you've reflected.

    If you want to be able to step through the .Net framework source code, you just need to point to the Microsoft source servers

    http://blogs.msdn.com/sburke/archive/2008/01/16/configuring-visual-studio-to-debug-net-framework-source-code.aspx

    Kakodaimonos on
  • DocDoc Registered User, ClubPA regular
    edited February 2010
    Yeah, any reason not to use a debugger in any given language? They are available for every language, ever.

    Doc on
  • LewishamLewisham Registered User regular
    edited February 2010
    Doc wrote: »
    Yeah, any reason not to use a debugger in any given language? They are available for every language, ever.

    ...unless you're talking about programmatically looking at software at runtime, in which case you need reflection.

    Lewisham on
  • kedinikkedinik Registered User regular
    edited February 2010
    Lewisham wrote: »
    Doc wrote: »
    Yeah, any reason not to use a debugger in any given language? They are available for every language, ever.

    ...unless you're talking about programmatically looking at software at runtime, in which case you need reflection.

    Yeah, that's what I'm talking about; I want to write a program that can generically summarize the runtime behavior of other programs, without needing to create specific breakpoints each time.

    Thank you all for the advice.

    kedinik on
  • TavataarTavataar Registered User regular
    edited February 2010
    If you are working in Java you can use Yourkit to profile the JVM.

    Tavataar on
    -Tavataar
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