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...

  While IIS Express support shipped in Visual Studio 2010 SP1, unfortunately profiling code running in IIS Express does not just work out of the box.  The issue is that the profiler does not “know” how to setup and launch the IIS Express process...

For better performance, VS Profiler requires the report to be on a local drive. If you change the report file location through Performance Session properties page (right click on performance session in Performance Explorer –> Properties –> General...

In Visual Studio 2010 SP1 we enabled the ability to profile Silverlight applications from the Visual Studio UI.  Unfortunately there is a limitation where we cannot automatically attach to multiple processes on launch from inside Visual Studio, so...

  If you install recently published VS2010 SP1 Beta , you can discover that VS Profiler team enriched Silverlight profiling user experience. Previously I published few posts about VS2010 usage for those purposes, either through VS Profiler command...

VSPerfASPNetCmd is a new Visual Studio 2010 tool that helps you profile ASP.Net websites from the command-line. Recently I noticed an error message which didn’t cover one common situation so I thought I’d write about it. Here’s an example...

  While using Visual Studio Profiler either from Visual Studio UI or through command line tools, you may wish to collect more/different information using specific CPU Performance Counters. The collected data depends on the profiling mode. As usage...

Does your native code deals with critical sections or other synchronization primitives? Does your managed code uses C# lock statement or Monitor class? If yes, and if you would like to get a clear picture of all contentions in your application, you might...

In my previous post I showed how VS2010 Profiler command line tools can be used to profile your Silverlight 4 application, as this feature is only partially integrated with Visual Studio UI. While we are working on a full integration story, let me show...

Did you know that Visual Studio 2010 Profiler allows you to profile your Silverlight 4 applications? You didn’t? It does. This feature, however, is only partially integrated with Visual Studio UI, and you need to use command line tools to collect the...

Visual Studio 2010 brings a number of innovations to multithreaded and parallel computing. One of them is Resource Contention Concurrency Profiling. John Robbins gives a really great first look at this feature in his Wintellect VS 2010 Beta 2 Concurrency...

The new guidance feature in the VS2010 profiler will look familiar to people who have used the static code analysis tools in previous versions. However, instead of statically analyzing your code, the profiler runs it and analyzes the results to provide...

With Visual Studio 2010 we want to make it clearer when you are profiling your application within the Visual Studio IDE. To accomplish this we added a new control which we call ‘Profiling In Progress’ or PIP, which we show when you launch the profiler...

A recent Concurrency Hazards: False Sharing article demonstrates how VS2010 profiler can be used to detect source of cache data locality issues. To achieve this, you can sample with cache specific CPU performance counters, as long as you do not run inside...

I’ve already discussed how the new profiler summary page makes it easier to discover and fix performance issues, but sometimes a little more investigation is required. This time I’m going to drill in with another new VS2010 feature called the Function...

One day, you may try to use Visual Studio profiler to sample an application you develop, and end up with an error saying no data is collected: Profiling started. Profiling process ID 2752 (<Your Application Name>). Process ID 2752 has exited. Data...

When you run VS 2008 SP1 profiler on Intel Nehalem CPU based machine, you may experience crash of operating system (blue screen). This problem occurs because the sampling profiler uses a kernel mode driver in the operating system. However, the Intel Nehalem...

Visual Studio profiler usage on virtual machines was limited so far, as it didn’t support Sampling mode in such environment. I’m glad to note that in Visual Studio 2010 you can sample your applications inside of virtual machines. VMs could be created...

Profiling NUnit tests can be achieved in a few simple steps. The first step, of course, is to decide on which method of profiling is best suited to analyze the performance of your unit test. One of my earlier posts addresses this question, which you can...

With Visual Studio 2010 we want to make it easier for customers to find and fix performance issues with their code. One of the first things we looked at was the view that shows up after profiling an application – the Summary Page. I’ll describe a few...

In announcing 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...

Think of a typical three-tier application; the one that has, let’s say, an ASP.NET UI, a business logic layer, and a data access layer which talks to a SQL Server instance. Ever wondered which queries are executed as a result of serving a page? Ever wondered...

Short Answer: Profiling Mode When to use CPU Sampling Use this mode to identify methods that consume too much CPU. This mode has low overhead and is well suited for CPU bound applications. Instrumentation Use this mode to get exact call count and exact...

Before Visual Studio 2010, in order to attach the profiler to a managed application, certain environment variables had to be set using vsperfclrenv.cmd. An example profiling session might look like this: vsperfclrenv /sampleon [Start managed...

On Monday, we released Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Beta 2 to the web!  In the new, simplified product lineup, you will find the profiler in the Premium and Ultimate editions. We’ve made a lot of progress since Beta 1 with the profiler...