Performance: Using Visual Studio Analyzer to identify application bottlenecks

This article discusses:

Target Performance bottlenecks

Application Code Analysis

Compare profiling data

Performance reports

This article uses the following techniques:

Visual Studio 2008

Over the past decade, many new software technologies and platforms have emerged. Each new technology requires specialized knowledge to create a performance-friendly application. Now, because a variety of Internet technologies (such as blogs) make it easy for frustrated users to negate your application, you really need to place performance first. In the early stages of planning, you should add response performance requirements and create prototypes to determine possible technical limitations. Throughout the development process, you should also measure the performance aspects of your application to discover possible performance degradation while ensuring that testers file and track their errors in slower situations.

Even with the best plans, you must still investigate performance issues during product development. In this article, we'll show you how to use the visual Studio®team System Development Edition or the visual Studio team Suite to determine the performance bottlenecks in your application. You will be introduced to the Visual Studio Analyzer by walkthrough a sample performance Survey. Note that although we use C # to write code examples in this article, most of the examples here are equally valid for native C/s and Visual basic® code.

Application Profiling

We will use the parser that came with the two versions of Visual Studio that we mentioned earlier. Start by writing a small sample project for drawing Mandelbrot irregular graphics, as shown in Figure 1. The application is not very efficient and takes about 10 seconds to draw irregular graphics.

Figure 1 Target program for performance testing