At StirTrek I found out about an awesome developer tool that I would like to point out.
I had the privilege of hearing about it directly from Anthony vander Hoorn which is one of the creators of Glimpse. Glimpse is a tool for debugging your ASP.NET MVC or ASP.NET Web Forms site from a high level. It has two major features:
1. It tracks all the requests for a page from the GUI all the way to the back end. It has tabs for the different layers.
2. It describes all the environment information. At nearly all the clients that I have worked for, the developer has access to the development site. However for QA and Production Sites, usually a systems administrator group has full access and developers have no access. Did everything get deployed correctly with your 1057 step deployment script? Really you don't know for sure. Glimpse helps answer that question. It also helps with targeting which layer has performance issues from the GUI all the way to the back end.
After seeing it in action and talking to some of my developer friends, it seems that I have been living in a cave. Glimpse is something every developer should know about.
The Glimpse Core is available on NuGet. There are also 67 plug ins for the tool.
