Chapter  11

Advanced Debugging and Analysis

At this point in your Android learning, you've got a few applications under your belt, and you may have encountered some unexpected behavior from them. We'd like to take some time in this chapter to explore the various ways you can debug an application, so you can look inside your application and find out what's going on. Although there are ways to do this without Eclipse and the Android plug-ins, that's what we're going to use here.

The Eclipse Debug perspective is the standard one that comes with Eclipse, and is not specific to Android programming. However, we want to make you aware of what can be done with it. The DDMS perspective has quite a few very useful features to help you debug your applications. These include Devices view (for seeing what you're connected to), Emulator Control (for sending in telephone calls, SMS messages, and GPS coordinates), File Explorer (for viewing/transferring files on the device), Threads, Heap, and Allocation Tracker (for seeing inside your application). We'll also dive into the Hierarchy View perspective so you can traverse the actual view structure of a running application. Then we'll touch on Traceview which makes it much easier ....StrictMode