When I started working at Microsoft this past June, I was excited about two main aspects of my job. First off, I was going to work with developer tools. It’s a truly great thing to be able to work with and to improve a product that you yourself rely on...

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...

IntelliTrace in Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate What is IntelliTrace in a nutshell? If you’ve been in the development world for any length of time you’ve probably ended up in a situation like one of the following more than a few times. · You’ve received...

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...

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...

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...

Welcome back to my walkthrough of how to use the new profiler in Visual Studio Team System 2005 . If you are unfamiliar with the new profiler, check out the first part of my walkthrough to get some basic info about the profiler. In the last section of...

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...

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...

I’ve pulled together all of the technical articles and walkthroughs from the various team member blogs that relate to the profiler. If you want some info about how to use the profiler in Visual Studio Team System 2005 this is the place to be. Posts...

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...

In this installment of my walkthroughs for using the new profiler in Visual Studio Team System , I’ll be showing how to collect and view some interesting data about managed objects. To enable the collection of managed object data, you’ll need to set the...

I just recently whipped up a FAQ on the profiler to post as a sticky thread in the VSTS for Developers forum. In the interests of getting this information out to as many people as possible, I'm posting it here as well. Q: What is the difference...

For those of you who are new to these walkthroughs, I am detailing how the new profiler in Visual Studio Team System 2005 works from within the IDE. If this is your first look at these walkthroughs, check out part one for my introduction and to learn...

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...

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...

Over the last week I’ve shopped for and purchased an LCD TV to use as both a computer monitor and as a HD gaming TV. Since I had a bad buying experience involved in this, I figured that I would share my two cents about the process. The first TV...

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...

What can I say…I’m a big fan of hello world type walkthroughs. With new technology you often just want to bite off a little chunk to see what is has to offer. In that spirit, I’ll be taking a quick two part dive into running a simple code coverage scenario...

Recently at work I was called on to fix a bug regarding primary interop assemblies created with tlbimp. Our issue was in finding out how to get the correct company name and version info into the interop assemblies, since tlbimp does not let you specify...

In my previous series of blog posts I’ve outlined how to create and configure a new profiling session in Visual Studio Team System 2005 . Now I’m going to take a look at using the various analysis views provided by the IDE to diagnose a performance issue...

If you are not familiar with the new IntelliTrace feature in Visual Studio Team System 2010 than you might want to first check out either my or John Robbins’ introductions to this feature as a general overview of IntelliTrace would be helpful before digging...

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...

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...

One of our main goals with IntelliTrace was to help close down the “no repro” gap between developers and testers. It’s frustrating and a waste of time and resources to have testers and developers going back and forth with testers reporting issues and...