On this episode, the guys talk to Anthony van der Hoorn and Nik Molnar about Glimpse, which allows you to debug your web site or web service right in the browser.

  • Jon asks why Glimpse was created.
  • Anthony gives a high-level explanation of what Glimpse does.
  • Glimpse is for your server what Firebug is for your browser.
  • Glimpse exposes a plugin architecture that allows it to be extended as necessary.
  • Kevin asks if Glimpse can be leveraged from application code. Nik explains it is possible, but 99% of the functionality you need will not require any extra code in your application.
  • You can point your logging framework to Glimpse and then you can see log entries relevant to the request.
  • The guys talk about how Glimpse fits in with NLog, ELMAH, mvc-mini-profiler, etc.
  • Nik says Firebug + Fiddler + Glimpse is the trifecta of development tools.
  • Jon asks how Glimpse can be used to help a user experiencing trouble with a production site.
  • Jon asks about running Glimpse in production.
  • Twitter question from @danielauger: “What was the most difficult metric to tap into?”
  • Anthony and Nik explain all the detail that is tracked in the Execution tab of Glimpse.
  • Anthony talks about how they decided to display all the data that Glimpse has.
  • Jon and Anthony talk about how Glimpse could be used to improve page response times.
  • Kevin asks about the performance overhead of using Glimpse and using it in production.
  • Nik explains how Glimpse plugins are enabled/disabled.
  • Jon asks about seeing the validation rules for a particular request.
  • Anthony talks about what is added in to core Glimpse versus what goes in to Glimpse plugins.
  • Jon asks about how Glimpse handles Ajax.
  • Kevin asks about record-and-replay functionality in Glimpse.
  • Jon asks about the implementation of the client side display of Glimpse data.
  • Nik explains how to configure Glimpse to easily compare differences between test, staging and production environments.
  • Jon asks about the future of Glimpse.

Show links:

Download / Listen:

Herding Code 124: Anthony van der Hoorn and Nik Molnar on Glimpse

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Note: Thanks to @rossfuhrman for typing our show notes this week!

Bookmark and Share