Archive for the ‘Dotfuscator CE’ Category

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Automating Runtime Intelligence Code Injection

Monday, August 30th, 2010 by Joe Kuemerle

With the release of Dotfuscator Community Edition in Visual Studio 2010, developers were given a way to quickly and easily add application analytics functionality to their projects at no additional cost. Using Runtime Intelligence, developers or build managers can implement a customer experience improvement program to track how people are actually using the deployed applications in the wild. In May 2010, PreEmptive Solutions partnered with CodePlex to provide commercial level Runtime Intelligence data reporting to any project hosted on CodePlex.

The version of Dotfuscator that ships with Visual Studio 2010 can’t be added to an automatic build script because it requires user interaction to perform a build. The commercial version of Dotfuscator has both an MSBuild task and a command line option for build automation, but purchasing a commercial license for a pure open source project is normally not an option. At the request of the community, we are making two options available to help alleviate this issue.

The first option, available to anyone who has Visual Studio 2010 Professional or higher, is to register for and download a patch to upgrade the installed version of Dotfuscator CE to version 5.0.2601. This version of Dotfuscator includes a command line interface and removes the restrictions that block automation. It does not require any user action to start a build, nor does it require Visual Studio to be running. The instrumentation abilities are identical to the previous versions: up to 10 named features with none of the advanced functionality from the commercial version (custom data gathered at runtime, detailed system and performance data, unique serial numbers, custom tamper and expiration behavior). To download this patch, you will need to create an account here . Go to My Account and the patch will be available in the Downloads section. After you install the patch, you will have a new DotfuscatorCLI.exe application in your Dotfuscator CE installation directory which you can use to automate builds. The command line is similar to the commercial version of Dotfuscator and is documented in the Command Line Interface reference in the online documentation .

The second option is that open source projects hosted on CodePlex can use the commercial version of Dotfuscator to instrument the application. Any project administrator can request a PreEmptive Open Source Project License here and receive the full version of Dotfuscator to use as the Runtime Intelligence code injection tool for their project. The project will then have access to the full range of instrumentation features available to commercial users including custom data gathered at runtime, support for occasionally connected clients, easy integration for Silverlight XAP and ClickOnce packages and ongoing enhancements as we release new commercial versions of Dotfuscator. Additionally, the project will be able to use the MSBuild task or the command line to easily integrate into their automated build environment.

With these options, developers are now better able to get accurate and actionable feedback on how their applications are really being used and can tighten the feedback look between themselves and their users. Better information on usability and functionality will lead to improved applications, and now it’s easier than ever to get that data.

Posted in Application Lifecycle Management, Dotfuscator, Dotfuscator CE, Runtime Intelligence | No Comments »

Track Application Usage Statistics for CodePlex Projects

Tuesday, May 11th, 2010 by Joe Kuemerle

Open source software thrives on feedback and participation. Without a good idea of what users want, projects easily become irrelevant. Knowing how many people are actively using your application, as well as which features they’re using (and which ones they’re not) provides significant feedback that helps to focus development, resulting in an improved application that meets the user’s needs.  With CodePlex’s integration of Runtime Intelligence features, project coordinators now have the ability to inject application analytics features into their releases.

Projects hosted on CodePlex can use either the free version of Dotfuscator (included in Visual Studio 2010) or the commercial edition to inject application analytics features into their binary distributions.  The application analytics automatically tracks how many times is run in the wild and the duration of those runs. This provides a measurement of application popularity beyond counting the number of downloads.  Basic system profile information, such as which operating systems and framework versions the application are run under, is gathered and reported on as well.  Additionally, feature usage within the application can be measured including the number of executions as well as their duration.  Total application runs per day statistics are available on the projects statistics page on CodePlex and detailed usage data is available from a link on the statistics page.

With the understanding that there can be privacy concerns, Runtime Intelligence instrumentation transmits no personally identifiable information.  It is also very easy to surface the built in Opt-In/Opt-Out functionality in the library and give individual application users the choice to participate in the program.

The individual usage data is aggregated and daily application usage is viewable on the projects statistics page as well as links to detailed reports of application and feature usage.

Instrumentation of applications compiled against .NET 2.0 and higher (including Silverlight 2, 3, and 4) is supported by Dotfuscator Community Edition.

Projects that use custom attributes to decorate their injection points are permitted to redistribute the PreEmptive.Attributes.dll library as part of their source code.  The library is only necessary for compilation of the application and references to it are stripped out during the instrumentation process, so it does not need to be included in binary distributions.  A signed downlevel version of the attributes library is available on the CodePlex Runtime Intelligence Integration project page (http://runtimeintelligence.codeplex.com/releases ) that can be used in any project targeting .NET 2.0 or higher.  This library is also allowed to be generally distributed with project source code.

Any project hosted on CodePlex can now take advantage of the deep knowledge into user activity that Runtime Intelligence Services provides by reviewing a sample walkthrough here and implementing this new feature into a future release.

Posted in Dotfuscator, Dotfuscator CE, Microsoft, Runtime Intelligence, Software Development Lifecycle Management, Uncategorized | No Comments »

Patch Released for Dotfuscator Community Edition 5 Affecting VB.NET RTM Projects

Saturday, May 8th, 2010 by Joe Kuemerle

A late breaking change in the RTM version of Visual Studio 2010 causes the included version of Dotfuscator Software Services Community Edition (version 5.0.2300) to fail to build new VB.NET projects with an “Encountered nooptimization at line X” message.  A patch is available to update Dotfuscator and is available at http://preemptive.com/support/dotfuscator-support

Posted in Dotfuscator, Dotfuscator CE | No Comments »

Launch of Visual Studio 2010 & Dotfuscator CE 5

Monday, April 26th, 2010 by Brandon Siegel

With the launch of Visual Studio 2010 and Silverlight 4 at the DevConnections show in Las Vegas last week, I am pleased to announce that Dotfuscator CE version 5 is now generally available. With an all-new user interface, more intelligent obfuscation, and application analytics instrumentation, this promises to be the biggest change we’ve made to Dotfuscator CE in its history. I am particularly excited because soon, with the application analytics included in Dotfuscator CE, millions of developers world-wide will have the opportunity to see real usage data coming in from their applications. Even better, they will be able to do so completely cost-free.

I was invited to act as part of PreEmptive’s delegation to the launch event and humbled to speak with so many passionate developers, architects, DBAs, and yes – even managers. What I did not initially expect was the overwhelmingly positive response from nearly everyone we talked with. Most people had never heard of application analytics. But, with a brief introduction everyone quickly understood the idea and many offered up scenarios where they would want to use it for their applications (completely unsolicited, I might add). It was thrilling to receive such a positive response to something I - and the other fantastic developers here at PreEmptive - have worked very hard over the past few years to create.

I very much encourage the great folks I met in Las Vegas last week, along with millions of passionate developers across the globe, to open up Dotfuscator CE and try out the free analytics we’ve included. Today, most web developers wouldn’t think of publishing a web site without including web analytics. I hope that having these analytics included with Visual Studio 2010 will lead to application developers thinking the same way about their applications. Of course, using the two together in a Silverlight or ASP.NET application to get a complete view of the visitor’s experience is a natural fit. But application analytics extends far beyond that. Now, all .NET developers are able to get live information that can help steer development focus, even in areas that were previously completely opaque – from cloud apps running on Windows Azure to mobile phone applications on Windows Phone 7 and even to applications running on Linux and Mac with Mono.

In fact, I look forward to seeing how application analytics will be used to support open source development throughout the .NET ecosystem. Because open source developers essentially donate their spare time, being able to focus their efforts in places that have the most user impact is crucial. An open source development model also allows far greater flexibility for developers to immediately shift their focus to match what their users are actually doing with the software they produce, without the constraints of rigid development and deployment practices. Because of these factors, I specifically encourage maintainers of open source projects to try the free application analytics provided in Dotfuscator CE. Together with the bug reports and feature requests you already have, you will be able to truly make the most of the precious time that your contributors give.

Some might say that it’s counterintuitive for a company known for source code obfuscation to support open source development, but at PreEmptive our guiding principle is simply “help software succeed”. With application analytics, we have the opportunity to extend our dedication to this principle beyond proprietary software. In the past few months, we’ve released numerous projects on CodePlex including some awesome editor extensions that integrate application analytics right into the Visual Studio 2010 IDE, an endpoint starter kit so you can write your own backend to receive and process Runtime Intelligence messages, a data visualizer sample to demonstrate how to consume analytics data using our RESTful analytics API, and an API helper library to make using our API even easier. And our new partnership with CodePlex, which will provide free application analytics for hosted projects surfaced right within each project’s page, provides us yet another great opportunity to help software succeed.

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Posted in Dotfuscator, Dotfuscator CE, Microsoft, Runtime Intelligence | 6 Comments »

Today is the first day of Microsoft’s MIX10 Conference

Monday, March 15th, 2010 by Gabriel Torok

One of the items being announced today by Microsoft at MIX is the SilverLight Analytics Framework. The Silverlight Analytics Framework will let designers and developers visually build analytics into their Silverlight applications using Microsoft’s Expression Blend.

Now, most readers of my blog already know that Developers can already inject Runtime Intelligence analytics into Silverlight (and any other managed code) using Dotfuscator inside Visual Studio. I am excited about this new framework because it offers an entirely new way to configure runtime intelligence (using Expression Blend) and that means a whole new community of users also have access to analytics for the very first time. This is also being echoed by Michael Scherotter, principal architect evangelist at Microsoft Corp. and architect of the analytics framework. He writes that we have “successfully used the Silverlight Analytics Framework to open its application instrumentation to a new audience of designers.”

Runtime Intelligence offers the following advantages over traditional Web analytics services:

· The analytics endpoint (and the resulting data) can be self-hosted and managed by the application provider (you don’t have to send your data to a third party – but that option is also available too).

· While the resulting Web analytics maps to the Silverlight Analytics Framework data model, the underlying SOAP schema is shared with Dotfuscator’s instrumentation.

The common schema allows Dotfuscator to provide a complimentary instrumentation mechanism for any .NET Framework component. THIS means that

· Middle and back-office application tiers can be instrumented providing a deeper view across distributed application workflows.

· Older or alternative applications using WPF or some other non-Silverlight form factors can be benchmarked against the newer Silverlight applications to track both user behaviors and application usage.

The world of application analytics is about to take a big step forward. In fact I believe that one day in the not too distant future application analytics will be as common as web analytics is today and the distinction will eventually disappear.

What decisions could you make to better serve your customers, to reduce your costs, and improve your products if you had ready access to usage data streamed to you from the wild?

Tell me what you would do - I would love to hear from you.

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Posted in Dotfuscator, Dotfuscator CE, Microsoft, Runtime Intelligence | No Comments »

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