This week Microsoft is starting to talk about Visual Studio 2010. One of the best resources I've seen has a bunch of videos from various Microsoft folks about some of the new features and what the high-level goals of the next release of Visual Studio are. Take a look at the Channel 9 site. 

There isn't much about profiling just yet, although some of the other features being developed by the diagnostics team including 'Eliminate No-Repro Bugs' and 'Test Impact Analysis' are covered. For more details about those features, you may also want to keep an eye on John's blog.

We'll also start talking about some of our new profiling features on the main profiler blog. If you're going to PDC, be sure to check out my boss Steve Carroll's (and Ed's) session:

• Improving .NET Application Performance and Scalability.

You'll get to see how some of our new profiler features make finding and solving performance problems easier.

The Visual Studio Profiler has many properties and options and this tip shows you where to find most of them. Future posts may cover some of the specific properties in more detail.

Performance Session:   Select an existing Performance Session in the Performance Explorer to see properties in the Properties Window. If the Properties Window is hidden:  Press ‘F4’ or go to ‘View->Properties Window’.

Performance Report: Select a Performance Report in the Performance Explorer to view many properties including Collection, ETW, General, Machine Information, Performance Counters, Process, Thread and Version Information.

Performance Session Properties (and Options):

To adjust Performance Session properties: Right-click on the Performance Session (Performance1 in this example). Select ‘Properties’.

Properties for Performance1 are shown below. There are different categories of properties on the left (e.g. General, Launch, Sampling, …).

Performance Targets:

To adjust Performance Target properties: Right-click on the Target (ConsoleApplication3 in this example). Select ‘Properties’.

Adjust the properties for the Performance Target as required. These properties do not often need to be changed, with the possible exception of the Instrumentation property ‘Exclude small functions from instrumentation’.

Tools –> Options –> Performance Tools:

Some global options can be configured using the Visual Studio Options dialog, which is accessed via:

Tools –> Options –> Performance Tools

That’s all the properties I can think of but I’m probably missing some still. Probably the most important aspect to this tip is to emphasize that right-clicking with the mouse is often the way to access important contextual information.