Version 10.1.0
DevPartner for Visual C++ BoundsChecker Suite is a suite of tightly integrated development features. DevPartner incorporates static code analysis, error detection, performance analysis, and coverage analysis. DevPartner helps developers detect, diagnose, and resolve software bugs, maximize code performance, and ensure optimal code coverage and testing.
If you accessed this document from the product media or from the program shortcuts on your desktop, you may not be reading the latest release notes. For the most recent information, go to SupportLine, Micro Focus's customer care web site. The first time you access SupportLine, you are required to register and obtain a password. After logging on to SupportLine, click the Product Documentation link on the left side of the page, then click the link for your product. You will find the latest release notes listed with the other product documentation.
For installing product updates obtained through the Micro Focus SupportLine Product Update web site, refer to the applicable product update readme document. For licensing, system requirement, supported environments, and installation information, see the Distributed License Management Licensing Guide and the DevPartner Studio Installation Guide.
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Before installation, note the following:
Refer to the DevPartner Studio Installation Guide for more information on installation options.
Information about DevPartner is available through the DevPartner InfoCenter option in the
Start>Programs>Micro Focus>DevPartner Studio menu. For general product information,
refer to the Understanding DevPartner manual and the DevPartner Studio Quick Reference guide
available in PDF format through the DevPartner InfoCenter.
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If you want to use only certain parts of the DevPartner Studio feature set, you can do so with DevPartner Studio 10.1.0. Feature licensing lets you more accurately match and license DevPartner products with your exact application testing and programmer productivity needs. Upgrading your licensed feature set is as easy as contacting Micro Focus Product Sales to activate additional features. Feature licensing lets you license the following feature sets:
DevPartner Studio Professional Edition: Includes the entire suite of DevPartner Studio products; Error Detection, Code Review, Performance Analysis, Coverage Analysis, Performance Expert, Memory Analysis, and System Comparison.
DevPartner for Visual C++ BoundsChecker Suite: Includes Error Detection: Performance Analysis, Coverage Analysis, and System Comparison. Increase productivity and quickly build powerful, high performance Windows applications.
BoundsChecker Standalone: Includes Error Detection. Unmatched detailed error analysis specifically for unmanaged solutions.
Runtime Analysis: Includes Performance Analysis, Coverage Analysis, Performance Expert, and Memory Analysis. Collect and analyze source code to efficiently discover untested code, and optimize application performance and use of resources.
Performance Profiler: Includes Performance Analysis and Performance Expert. Deeper managed code application profiling to fine tune applications and locate and analyze even the hardest-to-find execution issues.
DevPartner Studio 10.0.0 provides full Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 support. This includes full support the analysis of applications developed using Microsoft Visual Studio, and full integration into the Visual Studio 2008 IDE. Analyze, detect errors and perform static code reviews in new Visual Studio 2010 project types.
DevPartner Studio 10.0 supports submission of additional Work Item types to Microsoft Team Foundation Server 10.0. DevPartner Studio 10.0 automatically populates Work Item forms with selected session data for the issue work item type, as well as bug and defect work item types. Work Items can be submitted through both Visual Studio 2010 and 2008 when used with Microsoft Team Foundation Server 10.0 and the active Team System project supports the Work Item type.
DevPartner 10.0 supports MSBuild to build any DevPartner project in Visual Studio 2010. MSBuild starts automatically whenever building a solution from the build menu.
DevPartner 10.0.0 lets you test and analyze any applications that leverage CLR 4.0, the common language runtime for .NET 4.0. CLR 4.0 support includes all DevPartner supported project types in Visual Studio 2010.
DevPartner now allows you to analyze Micro Focus Visual COBOL for .NET project types. This includes memory analysis, performance analysis, coverage analysis for managed COBOL for .NET projects. In-depth performance for COBOL for .NET projects can be done where standard disk I/O, network and other Microsoft standard .NET calls are used. Micro Focus Visual COBOL must be installed on the same computer as Visual Studio to enable the Micro Focus Visual COBOL for .NET project type for analysis.
Support is limited to experimental usage in this release, and no Code Review or native COBOL support is provided. DevPartner customers who wish to provide feedback on this capability should identify themselves through the Micro Focus SupportLine Customer Care web site.
DevPartner Studio Performance Analysis (PA) has been enhanced to more accurately track and measure overhead used by its instrumentation model while capturing performance metrics. These enhancements dynamically calculate PA performance overhead while it is running against a target application. This allows a more precise application performance measurement when comparing to clock (CPU) time.
Note that hardware and software interrupt architecture may impact performance timings and yield minor variances when compared to CPU time. Hardware and software interrupts execute Deferred Procedure Calls (DPC) and Asynchronous Procedure Calls (APC) instructions on the user thread being monitored in the target application, which is included in the target thread's timing. Also, since PA executes in the same target thread, the PA instrumentation model execution overhead lengthens the overall target thread execution time, which results in more opportunity for interrupts. The potential for interrupts occurring during a target thread execution varies depending on hardware and software on the machine executing the thread and on other machine activity.
Bug submission from DevPartner Studio to Micro Focus Track Record was removed in this release.
Metrics submission from DevPartner Studio to Compuware Delivery Manager was removed in this release.
If you have Internet access, visit the DevPartner Documentation page on the Micro Focus SupportLine site to view the Micro Focus Knowledge Base for additional DevPartner Studio issues and other information. The Knowledge Base is updated with new information as it becomes available.
Coverage Analysis, Performance Analysis
Error Detection
Currently, the recommended method for testing Internet Explorer 8.0 applications is to use the Web Script Coverage and Web Script Performance Utilities (Start > Micro Focus > DevPartner Studio > Utilities > Web Script Coverage for coverage testing and Start > Micro Focus > DevPartner Studio > Utilities > Web Script Performance for performance testing).
However, if doing Web site coverage or performance testing within Visual Studio is required, the following must be done.
IEXPLORE.EXE process.
It is listed in all capital characters as shown.All mixed-mode or managed applications profiled under Error Detection either with or without instrumentation require API metadata to function fully and properly. This is regardless of whether you are using the .NET Analysis or .NET Call Reporting features.
To generate API metadata for .NET system assemblies, you must execute the DevPartner Studio utility NLBFileInstaller.exe
with elevated privileges. This utility is located at <%CommonProgramFiles%\Micro Focus\NMShared\5.0>. To execute the file with
elevated privileges, right-click the file and select the menu option to run the executable as Administrator.
NLBFileInstaller.exe should also be executed with elevated privileges whenever .NET assemblies change or are updated on the computer
profiling under Error Detection, such as after a new .NET framework is installed. Execution time of this utility varies based on the number of .NET
APIs to be processed and the speed of the machine.
The first time that an application is run with Error Detection, you may see a dialog from Microsoft Internet Symbol Store detailing their Terms of Use. You must accept the Terms of Use to continue, even if you have previously accepted these Terms of Use when running a different program that also required Microsoft symbols.
This section presents known issues that apply to this release of DevPartner Studio. Click a category to view the list of issues.
Suite-wide Issues
Coverage Analysis
Error Detection
Performance Analysis
Issues Related to Visual Studio or to Visual Studio Team System
When running against a 64-bit application, you must change the Any CPU entry in your solution file to x86 or you will
get this message: DevPartner is unable to test 64-bit projects.
Systems with the Data Execution Prevention (DEP) setting configured as /NoExecute=Always On and the CPU's Execute Disable bit enabled
might prevent DevPartner Studio from loading into Visual Studio.
See article number 875352 in the Microsoft Knowledge Base for a detailed description of the Data Execution Prevention feature.
System-wide DEP is set in the BOOT.INI file using the /NOEXECUTE option on the system boot partition. By default this is
set to OptIn, which specifies that DEP is only enabled for essential Windows programs and services.
Setting this to AlwaysOn causes the DevPartner Studio installation to fail, and if the setting is changed to AlwaysOn after
installation it will cause the DevPartner Visual Studio package to fail to load into Visual Studio.
If you set DEP to OptOut, be sure to include the Visual Studio executable (DEVENV.EXE for Visual Studio 2005 and 2008)
in the list of programs and services that are not to run with DEP.
Collected static initialization data may not display for partial class member fields that have a constructor implemented in a different source file than the statically initialized fields. In these cases, source view may show no data for the static member field initialization. This is because the data is attributed to the constructor of the partial class and not the assignment statement for the static initialization of the field. If a source file only contains statically initialized member fields for a class, the source file will not be shown in the list of source files for the module in the results.
In some cases, when you profile custom Windows services while logged in through Terminal Services, you may not get session files. If this occurs on your system, you may be able to save the session data by specifying the full path and filename for the session file. For example:
DPAnalysis.exe /cov /output c:\temp\MyService.dpcov /s MyService
Note: This may not work in all cases.
You may be unable to merge coverage session files for ASP.NET applications.
DevPartner Studio can only merge coverage session files from the same build of your ASP.NET application. With ASP.NET, the executable name changes every time you rebuild the solution.
To avoid this issue, run all coverage sessions that you intend to merge without rebuilding your application between sessions.
Users of Symantec Endpoint may not be able to reliably detect memory leaks when using Error Detection. Symantec Endpoint loads a Dynamic Link Library (.DLL) file that interferes with Error Detection's ability to detect memory leaks. This issue does not occur with Symantec Endpoint release SEP 11 MR4 MP1a (11.0.4.4014) and later for the unmanaged client, but may exist still exist in release SEP 11 MR4 MP1a (11.0.4.4014) and later for the managed client.
To work around this issue, upgrade to Symantec Endpoint release SEP 11 MR4 MP1a (11.0.4.4014) or later for the unmanaged client.
When an application tested under BoundsChecker on the Windows 7 operating system encounters an unhandled exception, BoundsChecker is unable to prevent that application from terminating immediately. On earlier releases of Windows operating systems, BoundsChecker retained control of the application long enough to obtain a final memory leak report. On Windows 7, the application simply terminates. The session transcript notes the termination, but does not report the exception itself, and does not generate memory leak messages about what may still be allocated in memory.
In these instances, a final memory leak report may not contain much useful data, because the application does not get the chance to perform an orderly shutdown.
You must have Administrative privileges when building the BugBench sample application on Windows 7 and Windows Vista. Building the sample generates a COM DLL that must be registered. Windows 7 and Windows Vista will not allow the DLL to be registered if without Administrative privileges.
Error Detection will still report some Leaks and Errors, even if all Modules are OFF under the Error Detection Settings, because:
When starting Visual Studio 2008 on the Windows Vista Ultimate SP1 32-Bit, an error message may appear indicating that DevPartner Performance Analysis failed to get the session manager service and that profiling will be disabled. This can occur when DPAnalysis cannot create an instance of the COM object CLSID: 163DF3E5-701A-44d9-9B82-59F4EADBBAA8. This issue will be addressed in a future DevPartner Studio release.
In some cases, CPU time attributable to the expression part of a For loop can be incorrectly attributed to the body of the
For loop. This can occur in loops formatted so that the initializers, expression, and iterators appear on a single line, as in
the example below.
using System;
public class ForLoopTest
{
public static void Main()
{
for (int i=1; i<=5; i++)
Console.WriteLine(i);
}
}
If the body of the For loop appears to be consuming excessive CPU time, reformat your code so the initializers, expression,
and iterators appear on separate lines, as shown below.
{
for (int i=1;
i<=5;
i++)
Console.WriteLine(i);
}
If you install a DevPartner supported version of Visual Studio after your DevPartner Studio installation, follow this two-step process to integrate the two products:
The second step is required to integrate the DevPartner Studio help system with the Microsoft help system.
When using DevPartner Studio with a localized version of Visual Studio Team System, in which the name of the WorkItemType Bug has been localized to a string other than 'Bug', DevPartner Studio will not be able create and submit bugs to the Team Project.
If ever you have any problems or you would like additional technical information or advice, there are several sources. In some countries, product support from Micro Focus may be available only to customers who have maintenance agreements.
If you obtained this product directly from Micro Focus, contact us as described below. If you obtained it from another source, such as an authorized distributor, contact them for help first. If they are unable to help, contact us as described below.
However you contact us, please try to include the information below, if you have it. The more information you can give, the better Product Support can help you. But if you don't know all the answers, or you think some are irrelevant to your problem, please give whatever information you have.
Our Web site gives up-to-date details of contact numbers and addresses. The product support pages contain considerable additional information, including the WebSync service, where you can download fixes and documentation updates. To connect, enter www.microfocus.com in your browser to go to the Micro Focus home page.
If you are a Micro Focus Product Support customer, please see your Product Support Handbook for contact information. You can download it from our Web site or order it in printed form from your sales representative. Support from Micro Focus may be available only to customers who have maintenance agreements.
End of DevPartner for Visual C++ BoundsChecker Suite Release Notes
Copyright © 2010, Micro Focus (IP) Limited. All Rights Reserved.
09/27/2010 11:03 AM