Pulled Apart - Part XV: Understanding usage with Runtime Intelligence
Note: This is part of a series, you can find the rest of the parts in the series index.
A vital component of keeping a piece of software alive is to keep it useful to your users—but how do you know what your users are thinking about your software or what they consider valuable pieces of functionality?
Pull achieves this using a fantastic piece of software called Runtime Intelligence from PreEmptive Solutions, which is easy to integrate into your application to gather interesting and useful details about its usage.
Lottery Winner?
Yesterday I blogged about DevExpress, and today another (not-free) toolset—maybe I’m thinking I won the lottery recently… unfortunately, I haven’t! 🙁
What I discovered one July morning is that PreEmptive offers its software and services for Runtime Intelligence for free to CodePlex projects.
This could be CodePlex’s biggest secret—and another fantastic reason to use it for open-source hosting.
Stats
(Larger view) One of the first interesting stats is how many times the application has run—over 700 times for Pull! 😄 It’s always great to see that level of engagement.
(Larger view) You can drill down into these stats, which are publicly available and provide details on:
- Which features users rely on
- The OS and .NET Framework versions in use
- Where in the world the software is running
Technical
Adding this to your application is simple—just follow the official guide. A word of caution: ClickOnce, another great feature of CodePlex, doesn’t work seamlessly with Runtime Intelligence, so be aware of that.