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 and what do they think are valuable pieces of functionality?
Pull does this using a fantastic piece of software called Runtime Intelligence from PreEmptive Solutions which is easy to plug in to your application to get interesting and useful details on the usage of your application.
Lottery Winner?
Yesterday I blogged about DevExpress and today another toolset (which isn’t free) so maybe thinking I won the lottery recently – unfortunately I haven’t 
What I found one July morning, is that PreEmptive gives away the software and services required for Runtime Intelligence FOR FREE,to CodePlex projects for them to use.
This may be the biggest secret of CodePlex and another fantastic reason to use CodePlex for your open source hosting.
Stats
The first interesting stat given is how many times the application has run, for Pull that is over 700 times 
It is always great to see that it is used.
You can then drill down on to the stats, which are publically available and provide details on what features are used, what OS’s and versions of the .NET Framework are available and also where in the world it is being used!
Technical
How do you add this to your application? It is really simple, just follow the official guide. My one word of warning is the ClickOnce, another great feature of CodePlex, doesn’t play well with this and so you want to be aware of that.