Product Reviews
ANTS Profiler
A low-overhead, non-intrusive code optimizer.
This is a lovely little tool for the .NET Developer who wants to optimize
their code. It's a very simple tool, too. Pick an application. Execute
it from ANTS Profiler. Look at the results. Drill down through function-level
timings and hit counts to individual lines of code. The end result is
that is very easy to see exactly where your code is spending most of its
time. Both profiles and individual test runs can be saved for later re-execution
or analysis.
You can use ANTS Profiler with just about any sort of .NET application:
Windows forms applications, ASP.NET, Web Services, even COM+ applications.
Although profiling does introduce some overhead, it wasn't at all intrusive
on the applications that I tried. And certainly when you need to know
what's going on at this level of detail a bit of overhead is acceptable.
The user interface is very well done too. When you get down to inspecting
the actual code, it's color-coded just as it would be in Visual Studio
.NET. Timings and hit counts are shown to the left of the code, and little
bar graphs show you where the bottlenecks are. All in all, another excellent
tool from the folks at Red Gate.
About the Author
Mike Gunderloy, MCSE, MCSD, MCDBA, is a former MCP columnist and the author of numerous development books.