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Collecting performance counter information with the Visual Studio Team System profiler Introduction If you have ever done performance work on Windows systems you are probably already familiar with the PerfMon tool . This tool gives you an overview of your system performance and can be an invaluable...

Analyzing a performance report When you first open a performance report in Visual Studio 90% of the time the question on your mind is “where is my program spending most of its time?” In Visual Studio 2005 the best way to find this was to move to the calltree view and from there to follow the execution...

The new Developer menu in Visual Studio Team System In my recent series of blog posts I’ve been covering some of the cool new features that the Visual Studio Profiler team has been adding to the code profiler that is included with Visual Studio Team System for Developers (and Team Suite edition...

The Visual Studio Profiler Data Collection Control Part 1: Excluding Application Startup Time Even if you are familiar with Visual Studio Team System you may not already know that a powerful profiler is included with both the Developer and Team Suite editions of that product. If you are not familiar...

Comparing performance reports with the Visual Studio Team System Profiler With the recent release of the first Beta for Visual Studio Team System ( codename Orcas ) customers will get their first chance to see all the great new features that we are adding to the product. For the profiler in particular...

This past summer marked my second year (plus one summer internship) of working at Microsoft and on the Visual Studio Team System profiler . As a fresh out of college hire I had no experience working with large applications or working with application performance in particular. For me, as for many other...

So in my last blog article I talked about using the fuslogvw.exe tool to figure out .NET assembly binding issues. In this article I’m going to look at another tool that I find myself using daily in the debugging world, depends.exe. In a nutshell, depends looks at your binary files and creates a tree...

So let’s say that you are working with a large managed project and for some reason, one of your binary files just refuses to load. Perhaps you get some esoteric error message and perhaps not. If so then you may very well be in the world of managed assembly binding issues. For me, Microsoft was my...

It just so happens (and I know that I’ve mentioned it here before) that the Visual Studio Team System Profiler has both sampling and instrumentation modes available for you to use. However, in most of my samples so far I’ve been using the sampling mode of the profiler to profile some small applications...

For my team I’m the point man on tracking all of the customer feedback bugs that we get submitted from external users. This is one of the best parts of my job as I really enjoy interacting with customers and getting to keep my finger on the pulse of what issues are bugging our users the most. Having...

This FAQ will collect the most common questions that are asked about the code coverage tool that is included with Visual Studio Team System for Developers (and Team Suite edition). Q: Why am I seeing some uncovered blocks in my program when I’m sure that my test should be exercising 100% of my...

When you are working with the Visual Studio profiler in instrumentation mode you often want to be able to limit the amount of data that you are seeing. I posted an earlier TechNote (from an Angry Richard blog article ) that described (in 40,000 foot terms) some of the various functions in the Microsoft...

In our support forums for Visual Studio Team System I’ve seen a large number of questions from customers who have seen inconsistencies from the code coverage tool when covering sections of code that containing a foreach loop. What customers are seeing is that they are getting partially covered blocks...

When programming in .Net you are presented with several different ways to extract a numerical value (I’m using an Int32 for my example) from a string. Recently I was looking at the differences between Parse, TryParse and ConvertTo. So I figured that I would use the new performance profiler included with...

Looking for some good information on the Visual Studio Team System profiler or just on Team System topics in general? The kind folks at MSDN have opened up a new section of TechNotes to aggregate lots of quick-hitting articles on various Team System components. TechNotes are a little less polished and...

Just passing on the word: Team System MSDN Public Chat Visual Studio Team Edition for Software Developer & Visual Studio Team Edition for Software Testers When: Wednesday, November 16th @ 10am PST What: Join us to discuss the Profiler, Test Tools (Unit, Generic, Manual), Web & Load...

Hey all, It's been a little while since my last post as things have been (and continue to be) pretty busy for me. Recently I've been working on some TechNotes (~1000 word mini articles) that will be published up on MSDN. While most of these I have been converting from blog entries there have been a few...

One of the neat things about working on Visual Studio is that it is such a big and rich product that I’m always being clued into both new interesting features and old features that I have just missed up until now. I was recently working on some squarified treemap UI prototyping and I was coding up a...

For the last two days we had a chance as a team to pick up a pre-release version of Team System and give it a through user scenario test to see if we could sign off on it being a quality product. I actually quite enjoyed this as it gave me a change to try out some of the features that I haven’t had the...

Recently I was working through some of our codebase working on converting some existing string comparison functions to use new .NET framework 2.0 comparison functionality. Common practice was to use InvarientCulture for most string comparisons. The .NET framework has added a new StringComparison enumeration...

The Quiz: Recently Ricom posted a performance quiz on his blog asking about the performance scenario difference between the two following code fragments. The first fragment uses generics while the second uses an arraylist. Now, I’m not a performance engineer like Rico, but I figured that...

One of the recent jobs that I have taken on for my team is being the point man for dealing with bugs from the Ladybug system. I figure that not all of our customers are familiar with the Ladybug system , so I’ll give a quick intro to it. In the era of open source it’s vitally important to be able...

So if you are a customer and you are currently running on the Beta 2 release of Visual Studio Team System you might be unsure if you want to install the new July CTP release of Team System that just recently became available to MSDN subscribers. Well if you use the Visual Studio Team System Profiler...

If you have tried to profile signed binaries in instrumentation mode you may have seen the following error message pop up. If you attempt to continue, then the application that you are profiling will probably crash and you will not collect any data. The issue at hand is that when we instrument...

One of the early problems that I needed to solve when I started working at Microsoft was how to get the caller / callee view (shown below) to work properly. The difficult thing was getting three separate treegrid controls to scroll together (controlled by one bottom scrollbar) horizontally, but to also...