Visual Studio Profiler Team Blog

General Tips: /? is your friend. Until formal docs are written, you can see all the parameters that each command-line tool accepts by calling the .exe with the /? option. Do yourself a favor and set up the PATH environment variable. The "Visual...

Windows 8 brought a lot of great changes to Windows including a stronger security model and new capabilities for performance tools. I am excited about how the new capabilities allow us to deliver new performance tooling not previously possible, e.g. the...

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...

The profiler has been gone from Visual Studio for awhile. I think... 6.0? Or maybe even 5.0 was the last incarnation. The core idea is to provide a tool to find those parts of your application that are preventing it from meeting performance goals, and...

This is the second in my series of posts on what the heck all these numbers mean in the profiler. In instrumentation mode, we give 4 varieties of statistics for each function in the reports: - Elapsed Inclusive - Elapsed Exclusive - Application...

I wanted to address our most frequently asked question here. In the profiler reports we always report both an exclusive and inclusive statistic for each function. For instance, in sampling mode, each function in the function list reports “Exclusive...

There are three environment variables needed for a .Net application you wish to profile. The profiler team has provided VSPerfCLREnv.cmd to set these variables for you. The switches for this helper file are: for trace (instrumentation) profiling: ...

In Visual Studio 2008, we added a feature to exclude small functions from instrumentation. A small function is a function that has very few instructions and makes no function calls (i.e. it’s a leaf). The idea behind this feature is that small functions...

  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...

Rob Caron has posted a walkthrough for the profiler at the gotdotnet workspace . It is entitled “Profiling Managed Applications.” Any feedback in the comments is greatly appreciated as always.

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...

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...

Great primer on the art of analyzing storage subsystem performance: http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/storage/subsys_perf.mspx

If you are using Visual Studio Team System Beta 2 and using the profiler on unit tests, there is a small issue that you should be aware of. Currently the IDE does not stop you from right clicking on a running unit test and clicking “Create Performance...

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...

Rico posts some fun performance quizzes on his blog: http://weblogs.asp.net/ricom/archive/2004/08/18/216555.aspx [ejarvi]

There are a couple of new posts from some of the profiler team members: Steve Carroll answers the question “Why are there two copies of my function in Instrumentation mode function report?” And Ian Huff looks at how to profile signed binaries...

It's one of the most frequently asked internal support questions. This should help with the learning curve. http://blogs.msdn.com/angryrichard/articles/Profiling_Windows_Services.aspx [AngryRichard]

Larry Osterman is doing a really great series on concurrency and scalability issues. He's touching on how to identify them and some of the hidden places they manifest themselves. The great thing is that we've actually found similar issues in the profiler...

Rico Mariani has started up a Perf Wiki on Microsoft’s Channel 9 community website . He’s started it out with a good collection of articles from his blog on writing high performance applications. The Perf Wiki is very much worth a look.

Recently we had some feedback that it was tough to get enough information from the performance reports on the screen at once since they are displayed in the source pane area of VS. One quick way to mitigate this is to use 'Full Screen' mode in VS. This...

I saw a misconception on a blog summary of our DEV302 talk at TechEd that I wanted to clarify. The Team System Profiler (affectionately called F1 internally) is not just a combination of existing profiler add-ons available on MSDN. The product will...

FYI - This is a video recording of the general session demo on Visual Studio Team System given at TechEd 2004 http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=f8538aa3-f12f-4c44-b6f6-c655ac08f1cf&DisplayLang=en [ejarvi]

Just this morning someone on an internal microsoft list pointed me to a promising looking (and free) .csv parsing tool - http://www.logparser.com/ It claims the ability to run SQL queries against CSV files. http://www.microsoft.com/technet/community/scriptcenter...

Here's a video clip of the profiler at work: http://download.microsoft.com/download/1/1/d/11d5f95b-f75d-4921-8a32-46a14c4d1448/Static%20Analysis-Perf.wmv Also PREfast and FxCop videos: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID...