Summary

Debugging and troubleshooting a distributed application is a complex undertaking, due to the sheer number of parts in the application. A divide-and- conquer strategy is absolutely necessary. Start by testing your components individually, outside the MTS environment. When you have the basic application logic working correctly, begin testing components within MTS, gradually building up to the full application running on a single machine. Once the application works on one machine, test it in a distributed environment.

Many tools are available that you can use to debug and troubleshoot your application. In addition to the source-level debuggers provided by your development tools, you should also learn how to use the administrative and diagnostic tools provided by the system software your application uses. In particular, the MTS Explorer and MTS Spy can be used to troubleshoot components running in MTS. The Windows NT Event Viewer is an often overlooked source of information about errors encountered by system software. You can also write to the event log, private files, system debugger, or desktop display from your components and applications, to provide diagnostic information in situations in which you are unable to use a source-level debugger.