PolyTraceAid

This Cartoon is cited from Tech Comic [1]

Introduction

Welcome to the homepage of PolyTraceAid !!!

PolyTraceAid is an internal program documentation tool developed at
Object-Oriented Technology Lab (OOTL)
Computer Science and Information Engineering
National Central University
ZhongLi, TAIWAN

Programmers:

• Jhih-Hao Chen [2]
  
• YuYing Yu [3](Graduated)
  

Supervisor: Yung-Pin Cheng [4]

PolyTraceAid is an authoring tool based on the debugging break points.
In practice, a source-level debugger is a powerful tool for program comprehension because using a debugger allows you to see the output of the program, watch the variables and their value changes during the run, and browse the source code at the same time.
We suggest that an internal program document can be composed from several trace cases in PolyTraceAid. A trace case is a sequence of break points which can capture a control flow of a program run, typically designed to run an example which can go through the components which an author wants to explain. A break point in a trace case is called a trace point. Typically, a trace point is placed at a program statement from which an author expects to explain things. At a trace point, an author may link a document of arbitrary forms. Multimedia documents such as PowerPoint slides or voice recordings are particularly recommended for this procedure.

Download and Installation

PolyTraceAid is currently implemented as an Addins of Visual Studio. It is still a research prototype that requires a lot of polishing and bug fixes. Many well-known bugs are queued to to be resolved. Please refer to the section Known Bugs for information.

Download

Release version

If you want to use PolytraceAid Tool, please download PTAInstallFile here.

Source version

If you want to develop PolytraceAid, please download source from oolab's gitlab (Make sure you have permission)

git clone git@140.115.53.53:oolab/polytraceaid.git

Installation

Usage

1. Download release version
2. Extract All in the zip file
3. Find the Visual Studio Data Directory
   • Visual Studio usually create this directory( Named "Visual Studio (version)" ) in C:\Users\user\Documents\
     So the Path may looks like C:\User\USERNAME\Documents\Vusual Studio (version).
   • In the Visual Studio Data Directory, there should be a Directory named Addins. If not, Create The directory Manually.
4. Copy
   • PolyTraceAid.Addin
   • PolyTraceAid.dll
   to \Visual Studio 2010\Addins\
5. Installation Complete

Development

1. Download source version
2. 設定VSPlugin步驟如同Usage所述
3. 開啟編輯器修改C:\User\USERNAME\Documents\Vusual Studio (version)\Addins\PolyTraceAid.Addin內容，將<Assembly></Assembly>中的PolyTraceAid.dll路徑改為原始碼目錄底下的Debug/PolyTraceAid.dll
   例如："C:\Users\USERNAME\Documents\Visual Studio 2010\Projects\PolyTraceAid\PolyTraceAid\bin\Debug\PolyTraceAid.dll"
   如此一來就可以除錯被編譯出的dll
4. 編譯
   • 建置專案並執行(理論上此時應該不會有編譯錯誤的情形，若出現無法寫入dll檔案的錯誤，重開Visual Studio應能解決)此時即可開始繼續進行專案開發。

Installation Problem

If you encounter unknown error with error number 80131515 when launching Visual Studio.

Solve this by right clicking PolyTraceAid.dll and select "property", then click "Unblock" button as below

Restart Visual Studio this problem will be solved.