scarroll's Blog

One of our big missions here in VS Profiler land is to bring profiling tools to people who maybe haven't had access to one before. I know before I started here, I never really needed to use the Microsoft Symbol Server. However, for the profiler in sampling...

VSinstr has two different categories of switches. The first category of switches control which methods get instrumented. The second category of switches control whether or not profiling collection is enabled or not. They are completely orthogonal. ...

This post is adapted from an internal mail. The customers were somewhat confused about the reason their callstacks looked so different in Sampling mode and Instrumentation mode. Let's say your program consists of only 2 DLLs, foo.dll and bar.dll. Foo...

What's the name of the paper? Efficient and Precise Dynamic Impact Analysis Using Execute-After Sequences [PDF] Who wrote it? Taweesup Apiwattanapong, Alessandro Orso, and Mary Jean Harrold at Geogia Tech. Background: Impact Analysis is...

The most common question that comes in to the internal profiler by far is "Why am I not seeing any managed code in my profiles?" Most of the internals who use our profiler like to do profile collection using the command line tools. The reason why this...

Don't laugh! I've seen this happen a few times now. In the UI , if you are debugging your debug build and then switch to performance tools and push launch, you will be profiling your Debug bits! Don't do this. Make sure you have set your configuration...

So I'm going to try to add a new category of posts to this blog for interesting papers in Computer Science related conferences and journals. One thing that kind of blows my mind about CS lately is that even though we are more "connected" than we have...

This is actually just a corollary of the "Why don't instrumentation and sampling calltrees look the same" FAQ. In instrumentation, you will see all of the functions inside of the instrumented DLL as you would expect. However you will also see every...

I'll be on vacation for the next two weeks. I promise to be a good little blogger and write more posts about the profiler when I return. If you happen to be in Italy and see a hopeless looking Yank muttering in pidgin Italian trying to order gelato, that...

Who wrote it: Thomas J. Ostrand, Elaine J. Weyuker, Robert M. Bell from ATT Labs - Research What's it called: Where the Bugs Are Where was it published: ISSTA 2004 Background: Another really interesting area of research to us Team System folks...

I watched all 50 minutes of Rico Mariani's new Channel9 video which can be found at http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=54964 . It's a really excellent summary of the points that Rico has been driving home about getting better perf out of your...

So over the past two months, I've been busy with the rolling out of the VS profiler to as many internal teams as we can. We've gotten a lot of good feedback from this which I will start to share with all of you over the next few posts.