Philosophy
VB Watch is a suite of tools that work by instrumenting your source code, either to make it responsive to unexpected errors (VB Watch Protector) or to give it abilities to communicate with the VB Watch Profiler or the VB Watch Debugger.
Actually VB Watch does not modify your original project but a copy of it, unless specified otherwise.
To achieve that, VB Watch will:
copy the existing code,
instrument the copy,
add specific modules of code, which may be found in the VB Watch 2\Templates\ subdirectories.
By modifying these templates or creating new ones it is possible to customize VB Watch to meet your exact needs. Templates are only Visual Basic code so there's no new langage to learn.
Note: when used with a group of project (.vbg file), VB Watch processes each project in turn and creates a new .vbg file, so that you can easily load the transformed group of projects.
Plans
VB Watch instruments code by following instructions found in plans. A plan is a set of options that defines exactly:
which mofications should be made to the existing code,
which modules should be added
which action should be executed after the code is modified
Using plans
There are 3 levels of use:
easy: use predefined plans that perform basic operations,
intermediate: build plans with the VB Watch Wizard, which is enough to perform most operations,
advanced: edit plans in the VB Watch Control Center for powerful customization.
A good practice is to build a basic plan using the wizard, then customize it with the Control Center.
Running plans
There are several ways to instrument a project with a plan:
select the vbp/vbg project file to instrument from the toolbar of any of the three VB Watch tools,
from the VB IDE, while working on a project, select a plan in the VB Watch add-in toolbar and press the Start button,
automate and instrument in batch from the VB Watch Console or via its command line.
Once the project is instrumented and compiled
with an error handling plan: the instrumented executable is ready to ship to end users,
with a profiling plan: run the instrumented executable and the VB Watch Profiler will display timings and coverage at the end of the session,
with a debugging plan: watch how the instrumented executable behaves in the VB Watch Debugger windows.
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