The ‘Just My Code’ feature in the profiler has a few differences to the ‘Just My Code’ feature in the debugger so this post should provide a useful introduction.

Example Program

Here’s a very simple program I’ll use in this post.

using System;

namespace ConsoleApplication1
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            Foo();
        }

        private static void Foo()
        {
            double d = 0;
            for (int i = 0; i < 100000000; ++i)
            {
                d += Math.Sqrt(i);
            }
            Console.WriteLine(d);
        }
    }
}

Why ‘Just My Code’?

Typically when profiling you are most interested in optimizing code that you either wrote or you have control over. Sure, sometimes there will be issues in the frameworks that you are using or in other binaries, but even then you often control the calls into those frameworks.  Just My Code or JMC is intended to filter the data that is displayed in profiler reports so that more of the code you control shows up in the reports and the reports are more manageable.

For example, the Call Tree after collecting sampling data for the simple program above, with JMC off, is shown below:

With the default JMC options, this reduces down to:

What is ‘My Code’?

There are two conditions for code being considered ‘My Code’ by the profiler and they are both at the Module level (Module Name column in the screenshots above). In the example above, this means the checks are made against the clr.dll, mscoreee.dll, mscoreei.dll and ConsoleApplication1.exe binaries.

Modules considered ‘My Code’:

1. the copyright string for the module does not contain ‘Microsoft’, OR:
2. the module name is the same as the module name generated by building any project in the currently open Solution in Visual Studio.
   

How do I turn JMC on or off?

You can temporarily toggle JMC on or off on the profiler Summary Page in the Notifications area using ‘Show All Code’ or ‘Hide All Code’ (shown in red below):

The default setting may be configured as discussed in the following section.

How do I configure JMC?

Use Tools –> Options –> Performance Tools –> General and set options in the ‘Just My Code’ section:

The default has JMC on, showing one level of non-user callee functions. In the example above with JMC on, this is why we see the call to COMDouble::Sqrt(dobule) showing up in the call tree.

It is also possible to show one-level of non-user code calling user code, which in the example above would add one level of the non-user code that calls main, as shown below:

Why is ‘Just My Code’ only available for sampling?

When you instrument binaries for profiling, you have already performed some level of JMC. Only binaries that you instrument and first-level calls into other binaries will show up in the instrumentation report, so JMC is not really necessary.

Everybody likes to think that what they're working on is important so this is why I think performance (and measuring performance) matters and why it matters now more than ever.

In the past chip manufacturers like Intel and AMD did a lot of the performance work for us software guys by consistently delivering faster chips that often made performance issues just disappear. This has meant that many developers treat performance issues as secondary concerns that will get better all by themselves if they wait long enough. Unfortunately free lunches don't last forever as Herb Sutter discusses.

Chip manufacturers can no longer keep increasing the clock speeds of their chips to boost performance so they are reducing the clock speed and increasing the number of cores to take computing to new levels of energy-efficient performance. The result, which is discussed on one of Intel's blog's, is that some applications will actually run less quickly on newer multicore hardware. This will surely shock some software consumers when they upgrade to a better machine and find it running software slower than before.

Clearly we need to change our applications to allow them to take advantage of multiple cores. Unfortunately this introduces a lot of complexity and there are many competing opinions about how we should do this. Some seasoned developers are pretty negative about using multithreaded development in any application. Some academics suggest that we use different language constructs altogether to avoid the inherent nondeterminism associated with developing using threads.

Consider also that the types of applications we are developing are also changing. Sure, the traditional rich-client applications are still very popular, but there is also a demand for light-weight web-based clients that communicate with a central server (or servers). The software running on the servers must cater for many users and will have very strict performance requirements.

So how does all this fit in with performance measurement? Well now developers have to write concurrent applications that are difficult to understand and develop. They write web-delivered applications that must respond promptly to many concurrent users and it is unlikely that just upgrading hardware is going to fix any performance problems that crop up. The free lunch is basically over, so now we have to pay. One way to minimize the cost of our lunches is to be able to 'debug' or resolve dynamic software issues using a profiler just like you would use a debugger to fix issues with program correctness.

One of the main benefits of using a profiler instead of manually inspecting the code is that it avoids the 'gut feel' approach to performance optimization that is common. For example, a developer sees a loop like:

for (int i=0; i < some_vector.size(); ++i)
{
...
}

So they decide to optimize by making a temporary so that the size() function doesn't get called for every iteration of the loop:

const int some_vector_length = some_vec.size(); 
for (int i=0; i < some_vector_length; ++i)
{
...
}

The number of lines of code has now increased by 1. If the length of the vector is always small, it is unlikely this buys much in the way of performance. Even worse, a developer may start to do things like loop unrolling when the real cause of the performance problems is something they don't notice. As the complexity of the code goes up the maintenance costs increase. If a profiler were used, it would be much easier to isolate the cause of a performance problem without wasting time optimizing code that is barely impacting the performance of an application.

Before I get too carried away, I should clarify that performance matters, but only if the performance is poor. For example, if you're working on a User Interface (UI), according to Jakob Nielsen if the response time to a user action is less than 0.1 seconds, the user will feel that the system is reacting immediately to their action. If you're working on a computer game the performance requirement might be that the frame rate must be at least 30 Hz. In both of these cases the user will notice if the performance requirement isn't met, but they will probably not notice or care about performance if the performance requirement is met.

If you haven't used a profiler before, go and try out a Community Technology Preview (CTP) of Orcas which will be the next version of Visual Studio. For the full experience you should avoid using the VPC images which have reduced profiler functionality. Some day, maybe soon if not already, you'll have to fix a performance problem with your code and using a profiler might help.

If you're a subscriber to msdn magazine, take a look at the article in the March 2008, Vol 23, No 4 issue on Page 81 which describes how to use the Visual Studio 2008 profiler to improve the performance of an application. A couple of members of the profiler team examine a Mandelbrot fractal drawing program in some detail. They isolate and fix several performance problems in the code, speeding up program execution approximately tenfold.

UPDATE: You can read the article here.

This year if you didn't get a chance to go to the Professional Developer's Conference (PDC), there is still a wealth of information available to you. The most valuable resource I think are the videos of all the PDC sessions. Here are a few of the sessions that I've viewed and found most interesting:

• Improving .NET Application Performance and Scalability, starring my boss Steve Carroll and Ed Glass, this session covers a bunch of new Visual Studio 2010 Profiler features.
• Visual Studio Debugger Tips & Tricks, with speaker John Cunningham who is a Microsoft Development Manager (and Steve's boss), covering features in Visual Studio 2008, 2008 SP1 and features to look forward to in Visual Studio 2010. Note to self 'if you ever ship without symbols, I would fire you'.
• Microsoft Visual Studio Team System: Software Diagnostics and Quality for Services, featuring Habib and Justin, who are also folks from the diagnostics team. The most exciting demo from this talk shows off the cool new Historical Debugging feature. It also features the new Test Impact Analysis feature, which can tell you which tests you should run after changing your code.
• Framework Design Guidelines, by the guys who wrote the book of the same name, Krzysztof Cwalina and Brad Adams. If you write managed code this is a must-see session.

If you'd like to try some of the Visual Studio 2010 features for yourself, you can download the newest CTP here.

Today we released Beta 2 of VS2008. This is the first public release from Microsoft that contains a nontrivial amount of code that I wrote (even though I haven't written too much code just yet). I had barely synched up the source tree and only fixed a couple of bugs when we released Beta 1 but now I've found my feet and am contributing more.

The major release announcements have focussed on the flashier (and admittedly very cool) aspects of the Beta like LINQ and some of the HTML editing and Javascript debugging features. However, us Profiler folks have also been toiling away adding new features and fixing bugs. Look out for things like (and some of these already featured in Beta 1, but they just keep getting better):

• A promotion to the new Developer menu
   
  
• Hot path - find the critical path/paths through your call trees
  
• Noise reduction - trim and/or fold your call trees so that they are easier to examine. See above for folding example.
• Comparison reports - compare subsequent profiler runs to determine if code changes are improving performance
  
• x64 OS support - profile on x64 Vista or W2K3 server 

If you can, please download it and let us know what you think. If you don't have the time at least take a look at the overview video showing some of the major features. You should also check out Ian's entry about controlling data collection while profiling. Hopefully I'll have time to go through some of the new profiler-specific features soon.

Quite a few people at Tech-Ed wanted to know more about the various components of Visual Studio Team System (which we sometimes refer to as SKUs). For example, how does Team Foundation Server (TFS) fit in with the client SKUs? What are the differences between Visual Studio Team System Development Edition and Visual Studio Team System Test Edition? What is Visual Studio Team Suite?

These are very valid questions when you're considering which SKU to buy and since I'm not a sales or marketing guy I'll defer to some nice diagrams and comparisons already available on the web:

• Visual Studio Team System Overview - a diagram that shows all the pieces of Team System.
• Visual Studio 2008 Product Comparison - compare flavors of Visual Studio across many different categories.

While we were demoing at Tech-Ed we were giving out trial versions of Visual Studio 2008 Team Suite, with some detailed tutorials (called Hands-On Labs) and they were very popular. If you'd like to try out the Virtual PC Image as well, download it here.

Some of my colleagues at Microsoft were interviewed for a panel discussion about various aspects of Team System which is worth watching to see where Team System is heading (Visual Studio Team System Panel - Meet the Team).

I also managed to catch a few sessions at Tech-Ed and one of the more interesting talks was about Visual Studio 2008 Tip of Day. Each day for more than 230 days now, Sara Ford has been posting blog entries with tips for Visual Studio.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention an interesting series on Channel 9 that I found out about while at Tech Ed. This Week On Channel 9 covers some of the highlights from Channel 9 blogs, articles and videos. The focus is on the developer, which works well for me. The current episode talks about PDC, Pex, Build Bunnies, UltraCam and the Live Agents SDK.

Tech-Ed 2007 is starting tomorrow and the Profiler Team is sending a few people to sunny Orlando for the event. This is great news for me because my boss, Steve Carroll, is away for the week (just kidding Steve), but it is really great news for folks at Tech Ed because he'll be there presenting with Marc Popkin-Paine:

I believe they'll be demoing a few new Orcas features and giving a pretty good introduction to profiling. If you didn't know Visual Studio Team System has a profiler, or you don't think performance is important, you should definitely check this out.

If you're not lucky enough to be able to make it to Orlando this year, be sure to take a look at Virtual Tech Ed, which will include webcasts and other content from some of the sessions. One that jumps out at me is MSDN Webcast: A Lap around Microsoft Visual Studio Code Name "Orcas" (Level 200).

UPDATE: Steve is already helping people at Tech Ed. If you're there and you're interested in performance go and have a chat with him in the Technical Learning Center.

Every so often, on days like today, I need to debug on a machine where I don't have a debugger installed. There are a few options in this case, but one of the most convenient of these is to use Visual Studio's remote debugging facility.

The procedure is pretty convenient with Visual Studio 2010, since all you have to do is:

1. Log into the machine you wish to debug on (you can use TS). In my case let's use msl-1440087.
2. Make sure you can navigate to a share on the machine with the debugger installed (galaxy-dev for example).
3. Run the right version of msvsmon.exe from the share, for example, the 32 bit version, as follows:
   > "\\galaxy-dev\c$\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE\Remote Debugger\x86\msvsmon.exe"
   
4. Go back to the machine that the debugger is installed on (galaxy-dev) and choose 'Tools -> Attach To Process...'
   
5. Enter the machine name where you started msvsmon.exe in the Qualifier section.
6. Select the process you wish to debug,
7. Choose the type of debugging - Native or Managed etc.
8. Select 'Attach'.

Debug as you usually would. Thanks to Gregg for writing a blog post reminding me how to do this. You might also be interested in his post about Remote Debugging without domain accounts.

Last year my boss took a trip to sunny Orlando to present at Tech-Ed and to offer help and suggestions in the Technical Learning Center (TLC). This year I'm lucky enough to be attending with a couple of other folks (Habib and Tim) and since I'm not an official Speaker I'll be spending most of my time hanging out in the Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) demo station for Visual Studio 2008 Team System, Development Edition.

We've prepared a few demos covering things like:

• Profiling using Instrumentation Mode on a Virtual PC image.
• Collecting Allocation and Object Lifetime information.
• Analyzing Performance Reports.
• Using Code Analysis to improve your code.
• Enabling Code Analysis Check-In Policies.

We're also looking forward to discussing your specific scenarios so if you're at Tech-Ed and interested in diagnostic tools and solving performance problems we'd love to chat with you.

In announcing the Visual Studio Beta 2 profiler features, Chris mentioned that we have a new option on the Debug menu called ‘Start Performance Analysis’ which has the Alt-F2 keyboard shortcut. This makes it easier than ever to start profiling your application. The new menu item has the following behavior:

• You must have a Visual Studio Solution open in order to enable it.
• If you have a solution open, but do not have a launchable current performance session, Start Performance Analysis launches the Performance Wizard.
• If you have a solution open and have a launchable current performance session, Start Performance Analysis starts profiling.

Let’s use this new functionality to profile an application that I prepared earlier.

1. Open the solution with ‘Alt-F, J, Enter’:
    
2. Start Performance Analysis with ‘Alt-F2’, which brings up the wizard:
   
3.   Press ‘Enter’ to choose the default ‘CPU Sampling’ profiling method and move to the target selection page:
    
4. Press ‘Enter’ to select the only launchable project in the solution and move to final wizard page:
   
5. Press ‘Enter’ to finish the wizard and start profiling:
   
6. The report will open when profiling finishes:
    

If you wish to profile again, selecting Alt-F2 will start profiling with the Performance Session that was created after step #4.