The Windows Phone 7 product team announced a partnership with PreEmptive Solutions to provide their Dotfuscator application, which includes Runtime Intelligence, for free, to all Windows Phone 7 developers from today through March 31, 2011.

During this offer period, developers will have access to Dotfuscator for Windows Phone. This will allow developers to instrument their code, provide customer insight into their application usage, and gain access to app analytics via the Runtime Intelligence web service. As an added bonus, anyone who wishes to use Dotfuscator to obfuscate their XAPs has access to that functionality as well.

Here are some ways in which you might use Dotfuscator for Windows Phone:

• How many people have installed my app?– With this solution, and using the ANID as a hash key, you can instrument you app and track the number of unique LiveIDs which have installed your application.
• How often is my app run?– Did you want to know the run time of your app? What about how long specific functions take to run? All of that data can be collected by Dotfuscator.
• What features are customers using the most?– With your application properly instrumented, you will be able to determine where your customers are spending their time, for how long, and even at what time of day if you want.
• What’s the performance of my app on customers’ handsets?– Are you concerned about how your app is performing in the field? With instrumentation, you can analyze how the app performs on different handset models on different networks.

To get started, simply visit PreEmptive’s site http://www.preemptive.com/windowsphone7.html, get a Runtime Intelligence account, and download the code. If you want to see a nice, quick tutorial, watch this video. Also you can see a detailed discussion about Dotfuscator, and interview with PreEmptive's CTO, in the current edition of Inside Windows Phone, at Channel 9.