.NET Customisation
User Guide
.NET Customisation : How to Write a CAF Addin : Tracing and Optimisation
The PdmsTrace class gives access to all the facilities of the PDMS trace system and provides a means of outputting general trace messages and values during processing. PdmsTrace functions also enable querying and setting of PDMS trace flags; give access to the current state of the call stack; and allow starting and stopping of CPU time tracing.
The TraceEntry class provides the means to trace the entry and exit of functions as processing takes place. As the nesting of function calls gets deeper and deeper the function entry messages are indented further and further. Though this output can quickly get verbose it can frequently give evidence of problems in the code - for example functions being called too frequently … or not at all!
To work correctly in C#, TraceEntry needs to know about entry and exit from functions in correct chronological order. There is a difficulty with this in C# because of the way that "garbage collection" works in that language. This means, in particular, it is necessary to make sure that the function exit event occurs at the right moment. This can be achieved by using the Dispose method explicitly:
tr.Dispose(); // explicit call on exit
} // implicit call to Dispose() on exit from the block
PdmsTrace.StartCPUTrace();
