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

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:

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

[audio://herdingcode.com/wp-content/uploads/HerdingCode-0124-Anthony-van-der-Hoorn-and-Nik-Molnar-on-Glimpse.mp3]

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

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