Profiling Applications with Visual Studio

I’ve covered debugging, troubleshooting, and an introduction to uncovering memory leaks using debug tools. In addition to tracing and logging, it is also possible to diagnose your applications through an activity called profiling. Profiling tools are designed to help you measure performance-related issues in code. There are typically two types of profiling sessions. Memory profiling targets memory utilization and captures the object graph to help uncover memory leaks and other issues with the application footprint. Performance profiling looks at code execution times and paths to determine where the application spends most of its time so you can target changes to improve the speed and scalability of the application.

Several commercially available profiling tools were listed earlier in the chapter. Visual Studio also ships with a built-in performance profiler that supports profiling Silverlight applications by taking sample snapshots of the code being executed. To learn how to use the profiler, first open the Chapter15MemoryLeak project.