Debugging

This article is part of Typical scenarios series.

Though EurekaLog's primary target is to collect reports "from the fields", but many our customers use EurekaLog for other purposes. Most common side use is to debug bugs in applications directly on developer's machine. While Delphi and C++ Builder offer you a powerful debugger, which has many features and it's able to help you to solve almost any issue, but some people find EurekaLog to be more simple solution. I.e. they use EurekaLog to aid debugging on developer's machines.

Thus, EurekaLog offers some additional features, designed specifically to be used as part of developing and debugging stage. Thought they can be used in deployment release version of your software - it's highly unrecommended. If you do this - be sure to test your application to be comfortable for end-user.

Such "for debug only" features includes:

Please note: since EurekaLog's primary target is to collect reports at run-time on your client's machine - some of EurekaLog's features has lesser power than features in purely debugging software. For example, EurekaLog should use fast-enough approaches, as opposed to using heavy debugging code.

This means that sometimes it's better to use other software on your developer machine - such as Delphi's debugger (did you know that it has memory breakpoints?), debugging memory manager (FastMM in full debug mode, SafeMM, etc) or profiler (AQTime, etc). Those software is especially designed to be used as helpers at debugging stage. They typically are more powerful than EurekaLog, but because of this they can't be used as part of your release version - and that's EurekaLog's area.

Conclusion: typically you can try to use EurekaLog in debug version of your application to quickly locate issues. If EurekaLog is unable to help you - just switch to "heavy debugging" software.