How to use a profiler?

Question

Very often I hear: use the profiler and unit test. How can I do it? I would be glad if someone provided links to tutorial sites or recommended a good book. I am using Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate.

Answer 1

Finding application bottlenecks with Visual Studio Profiler describes how to use the profiler with VS 2008 - it should also apply to VS 2010.

Regarding unit tests and profilers:

• Unit tests can be used to verify that your application code matches a set of known conditions. Or, more simply put, test cases are configured to run the code and return Test Passed or Test Failed based on the set of statements that you specify in the test code.

• Profiles can be used to check the current code, to determine the functions performed by your code, the use of resources, etc. This is useful for identifying application bottlenecks (for example, 90% of CPU cycles can be performed as part of a single function) and for optimizing optimization optimization.

Answer 2

Here is the Team Profiler Team Blog.

RedGate has several tools for.NET profiles - they have a lot of videos and content on how to use them.

Here 's a good article from a simple conversation (using Profiler to speed application performance).