It is called Runtime Intelligence and it provides a way to inject new functionality into existing applications (either .NET or Java only at the moment) so that they send their usage data back to a central collection and reporting portal at runtime. This would allow you to actually track what the users are realy doing within the application. The reporting gives an overview of the usgae of the application, the relative popularity of each instrumented feature and can even provide metrics on how long users spend inside of particular methods. Using the data you can even recreate the actual execution path in chronological order that a given user took in a specified runtime instance of the application.

Since this new functionality is injected directly into the application binary (in a similar manner to an AOP frameworks post compile weaving implementation) the application can be instrumented to report on its usage without requiring any source code changes.

Since I am a developer on this product and not in sales or marketing I look forward to hearing feedback and discussion on this idea as I think it could be beneficial. I also would appreciate any direct feedback on other ideas that could be implemented with this technology as I’m always looking for use cases.

For a direct conversation I can be reached directly at my work email : jkuemerle at preemptive . com .

As for the obligatory product plug this functionality is not only available in our commercial products (Dotfuscator and DashO) but is also now inside of the new version of Dotfuscator Community Edition shipping for free in Visual Studio 2010 (and is in the current public beta). Not only is the code injection functionality in there but a free version of the data collection and reporting portal is also available so you can see some of the reports that are available out of the box without having to do any sort of registration.