DevPartner Studio 9.1.0 Professional Edition is a suite of tightly integrated development features. DevPartner Studio incorporates code reviewing, error detection, two kinds of performance analysis, coverage analysis, and a memory analysis feature all integrated into Visual Studio, as well as a system comparison utility. DevPartner Studio helps developers detect, diagnose, and resolve software bugs, maximize code performance, improve memory usage, and ensure optimal code coverage and testing.
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.
This section presents known issues and technical notes for DevPartner Studio. Click a category to view the list of issues.
Suite-wide Issues
Code Review
Coverage Analysis
Error Detection
Memory Analysis
Performance Analysis
Performance Expert
Issues Related to Visual Studio or to Visual Studio Team System
System Comparison
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.
TrackRecord integration features with DevPartner are handled through an Application Program Interface (API) supplied by the TrackRecord product. Because of this, the DevPartner's TrackRecord integration feature support is based on Operating Systems supported by TrackRecord. Refer to TrackRecord documentation for TrackRecord Operating System requirements.
The integration to the DevPartner Fault Simulator product does not work with DevPartner Studio 9.0.x. Users of Fault Simulator integration should use DevPartner Studio 8.2.
During installation or removal of DevPartner Studio, an MSI.EXE error message may display stating that the application has encountered
an error or has referenced memory it cannot read. Click OK and ignore this error. The install/uninstall will continue without error.
A DevPartner Code Review session file can only be deleted if it is not the active session file in a solution. A Code Review session file remains active after it is closed until another Code Review Session file is opened. If a Code Review session file is active, the Delete menu item is not available from the Code Review context menu.
To delete a Code Review session file, close the session file and open another session file in the solution, then select right-click on the closed session file in the Visual Studio Solution Explorer and select Delete. If the session file is the only Code Review Session file in the solution, close and re-open the solution, then delete the Code Review session file using the context menu.
The Japanese character set is not supported for Naming Analysis in Code Review.
If you notice certain anomalous occurrences, you should install Service Pack 1 for Visual Studio 2005. Indications can be the following:
If a C# method contains code of the form #if condition ... #else ... #endif, Code Review processes the code as though it
only consisted of the #if condition branch. Code following the #else branch is ignored.
User-defined hyperlinks that reference external files might not respond when clicked even though the target of the link is valid. You might encounter this problem if you attempt to click hyperlinks in either the Rule Set list or the Preview pane of the Edit Rule dialog box in the Rule Manager.
Examples include:
<a href="C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio .NET\FrameworkSDK\Samples\Setup\html\Start.htm">Microsoft .NET Framework SDK QuickStarts, tutorials, and samples</a>"
<a href="file:///C:\Program Files/Microsoft Visual Studio NET/FrameworkSDK/Samples/Setup/html/Start.htm">Microsoft .NET Framework SDK QuickStarts, tutorials, and samples</a>"
Any supported Visual Basic code that contains a Declare statement with an Alias clause will be bypassed in a code review when the DevPartner Studio API rules are used to scrutinize the code. This limitation is due to an accuracy issue regarding declared APIs that are also aliased. This limitation only pertains to Visual Basic Declare statements with an Alias clause. Any DLLImport attributes placed on Visual Basic or C# API methods declared as external will still be reviewed successfully.
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.
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.
Internet Explorer 8.0 (IE8) is supported for driving, testing, and profiling server applications, as well as for rendering of management reports, XML output, online help, and other general browser usage in DevPartner. However, IE8 in the parent/child process model compared to prior IE releases proved incompatible with the embedded script debugger used in DevPartner's browser-side profiling technique. If a test is performed with Code Coverage using an IE8 client, then no results are reported from the client. If a test is performed with Performance Analysis using an IE8 client, then the client report includes no script timings under the Source folder and unrelated or misleading system call timings. This remains a limitation of the DevPartner 9.1 release and will be corrected in a future maintenance release.
DevPartner customers who may be interested in participating in alpha testing to validate the resolution of this issue or other early experience programs should identify themselves through the Micro Focus SupportLine Customer Care web site.
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.
To profile applications with Performance Expert in Visual Studio 2008 on Windows 7 and Windows Vista operating systems, you must run Visual Studio 2008 with administrator privileges. To profile ASP.NET applications with Performance Expert in Visual Studio 2008 on Windows 7 and Windows Vista operating systems, you must start the application under an account with ASP.NET administrator privileges.
You may be unable to merge coverage session files for ASP.NET 2.0 applications.
DevPartner Studio can only merge coverage session files from the same build of your ASP.NET 2.0 application. With ASP.NET 2.0, the executable name changes every time you rebuild the solution.
To avoid this problem, run all coverage sessions that you intend to merge without rebuilding your application between sessions.
Running an application using Error Detection with the Memory Tracking feature may cause the application to stop responding. This condition is due to a race condition triggered by the Microsoft C Runtime Library (CRT) version 9. The DevPartner engineering team is engaged with Microsoft on a proper resolution to the issue, which does not occur in earlier versions of the Microsoft CRT library. The issue will be resolved in an upcoming DevPartner release after validation by alpha test sites. DevPartner customers who may be interested in participating in alpha testing to validate the resolution of this issue or other early experience programs should identify themselves through the Micro Focus SupportLine Customer Care web site.
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 Vista. Building the sample generates a COM DLL that must be registered. Windows Vista will not allow the DLL to be registered if without Administrative privileges.
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.
There are two situations in which DCOM or COM-based applications or components try to run under the restrictions of the aspnet
account. By default, when a DCOM or COM application or component is launched from within an ASP.NET enabled Web page, it will run
in the context of the aspnet account. For security reasons, the aspnet account is a restricted account (it is a member
of the Users group and has equivalent privileges). In this situation your COM component will not have the security privileges required for
Error Detection to function properly. To work around this issue, you must configure your DCOM or COM application or component to execute within
the context of the interactive user (via dcomcnfg.exe).
To configure your DCOM or COM application or component to run under the context of the interactive user:
dcomcnfg.exe.Error Detection will collect data properly the next time the DCOM or COM application or component is launched.
Error Detection will still report some Leaks and Errors, even if all Modules are OFF under the Error Detection Settings, because:
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);
}
There is a known issue that prevents Performance Expert from collecting lock data for methods that use the MethodImplOptions.Synchronized
attribute.
If you install Visual Studio 2005 or 2008 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.
System Comparison now checks for additional settings when comparing systems. If you compare a snapshot taken with a previous version of the System Comparison utility with a snapshot taken with DevPartner Studio 8.2 or later, these settings will be listed as missing from the older snapshot.
DevPartner Studio Professional Edition Known Issues
Copyright © 2009, Micro Focus (IP) Limited
10/09/2009 03:23 PM