Colin Thomsen's Microsoft Blog : vs2008

PDC 2008 - See the Sessions

colinth — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 00:07:00 GMT

This year if you didn't get a chance to go to the Professional Developer's Conference (PDC), there is still a wealth of information available to you. The most valuable resource I think are the videos of all the PDC sessions. Here are a few of the sessions that I've viewed and found most interesting:

Improving .NET Application Performance and Scalability, starring my boss Steve Carroll and Ed Glass, this session covers a bunch of new Visual Studio 2010 Profiler features.
Visual Studio Debugger Tips & Tricks, with speaker John Cunningham who is a Microsoft Development Manager (and Steve's boss), covering features in Visual Studio 2008, 2008 SP1 and features to look forward to in Visual Studio 2010. Note to self 'if you ever ship without symbols, I would fire you'.
Microsoft Visual Studio Team System: Software Diagnostics and Quality for Services, featuring Habib and Justin, who are also folks from the diagnostics team. The most exciting demo from this talk shows off the cool new Historical Debugging feature. It also features the new Test Impact Analysis feature, which can tell you which tests you should run after changing your code.
Framework Design Guidelines, by the guys who wrote the book of the same name, Krzysztof Cwalina and Brad Adams. If you write managed code this is a must-see session.

If you'd like to try some of the Visual Studio 2010 features for yourself, you can download the newest CTP here.

Tip: VS2008 – Finding and Setting Properties (Right-Click)

colinth — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 04:47:29 GMT

The Visual Studio Profiler has many properties and options and this tip shows you where to find most of them. Future posts may cover some of the specific properties in more detail.

Performance Session:

Select an existing Performance Session in the Performance Explorer to see properties in the Properties Window. If the Properties Window is hidden:
Press ‘F4’ or go to
‘View->Properties Window’.

Performance Report:

Select a Performance Report in the Performance Explorer to view many properties including Collection, ETW, General, Machine Information, Performance Counters, Process, Thread and Version Information.

Performance Session Properties (and Options):

To adjust Performance Session properties:

Right-click on the Performance Session (Performance1 in this example).
Select ‘Properties’.

Properties for Performance1 are shown below. There are different categories of properties on the left (e.g. General, Launch, Sampling, …).

Performance Targets:

To adjust Performance Target properties:

Right-click on the Target (ConsoleApplication3 in this example).
Select ‘Properties’.

Adjust the properties for the Performance Target as required. These properties do not often need to be changed, with the possible exception of the Instrumentation property ‘Exclude small functions from instrumentation’.

Tools –> Options –> Performance Tools:

Some global options can be configured using the Visual Studio Options dialog, which is accessed via:

Tools –> Options –> Performance Tools

That’s all the properties I can think of but I’m probably missing some still. Probably the most important aspect to this tip is to emphasize that right-clicking with the mouse is often the way to access important contextual information.

Tip: VS2008 - Understanding Performance Targets

colinth — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 23:48:43 GMT

If you have a solution that contains multiple projects it is important to know what the 'Targets' group in the Performance Explorer is used for. The PeopleTrax solution shown on the right has 4 projects, with 3 of them compiling to managed DLLs and 1 compiling to an executable.

After running the Performance Wizard to create a Performance Session the Performance Explorer contains a single target as shown below.

Only the project that compiles to an executable is listed in the 'Targets' folder (for other project types like websites it would include the default launch project). What about the other 3 projects? As this tip explains, it depends upon the type of profiling you wish to do.

Sampling

With sampling there is no need to add the additional projects to your targets list. We do not modify assemblies when sampling and we will automatically attempt to collect data for any assemblies loaded by the PeopleTrax target. The only exception to this requirement is if you wish to collect data for multi-process scenarios and therefore need to launch multiple targets.

Instrumentation

For instrumentation, if you wish to collect data for the additional projects they should be added to your targets list as follows:

In the Performance Explorer, right-click on the 'Targets' folder:
Choose 'Add Target Project' to display a dialog:
Select the assemblies you wish to collect Instrumentation data for and choose OK.

The selected projects will now be modified (instrumented) when you start profiling. You can selectively disable instrumentation for certain projects by right-clicking on the target and unchecking the 'Instrument' option.

Instrumentation properties for a specific target.