Here at Red Gate, we spend every waking hour trying to wow .NET and SQL developers with
great products. Every so often, though, we find something out in
the wild which knocks our socks off by taking “ingeniously simple” to a whole new level. That’s what a little community led by developers Nik Molnar and Anthony van der Hoorn has done with
the open source tool Glimpse.
Glimpse describes itself as ‘Firebug for
the server.’ You drop
the NuGet package into your ASP.NET project, and then — like magic* — your web pages will bare every detail of their execution. Even by our high standards, it was trivial to get running: if you can use NuGet, you’re already there. You get all that lovely detail without changing any code.
Our feelings go beyond respect for
the developers who designed and wrote Glimpse; we’re thrilled that Nik and Anthony have come to work for Red Gate full-time. They’re going to stay in control of
the project and keep doing open source development work on Glimpse. In
the medium term, we’re hoping to make paid-for products which plug into
the free open source framework, especially in areas like performance profiling where we already have some deep technology. First, though, Glimpse needs to get from beta to a v1. Given
the breakneck pace of new development, this should only be a month or so away.
Supporting an open source project is a first for Red Gate, so we’re going to be working with Nik and Anthony, with
the Glimpse community and even with other vendors to figure out what ‘great’ looks like from
the a user perspective. Only one thing is certain: this technology deserves a wider audience than
the 40,000 people who have already downloaded it, so please have a look and tell us what you think.
You can hear more about what
the Glimpse developers think on
the Glimpse blog, and there are plenty more technical facts over at our product manager’s blog. If you have any questions or queries, please tweet with
the #glimpse hashtag or contact
the Glimpse team directly on
[email protected].
[*That’s ”magic” in
the Arthur C. Clarke “sufficiently advanced technology” sense, of course]
Neil Davidson
co-founder and Joint CEO
Red Gate Software
http://twitter.com/neildavidson
