Profiling C# Apps on Windows Mobile Devices

Question

Does the VSTS (Visual Studio Team System) profiling capability allow me to profile apps running on attached mobile devices?  I need to profile a C# app on an HP iPAQ running Windows Mobile 5.  If I can't profile running on the actual device, will the profiler work if running the app in emulation mode for the device?

Thanks, Mike.

Answer 1

Mike,

Sorry to say, but the profiler does not currently support profiling apps running on attached mobile devices or on emulated mobil devices. For a tool that is as low level as the profiler we just could not consider supporting all the various mobile devices that are available in the release. We'll log you question as a vote for the ability to profiler mobile application as we plan our next products.

Thank much,

Ian

Answer 2

You can log this as an additional vote too.  Even support for Pocket PC's only would be a major step forward.

Answer 3

I'm bummed

Was also looking for Profiler support for Mobile Apps...

Answer 4

I was looking also for something like this, but I understand Ian and suppouse is a big complication to do something like that

 

+1

Answer 5

Just want you all to know that the +1s in a forum like this don't go unnoticed here at Microsoft. With a relativly new feature like the profiler we are always in a state of evaluating what features we want to include in upcoming versions. The more requests we get for a specific feature from our customers the heavier we weight it when considering new features. So if you see this thread and profiling on mobile devices is important to you, don't think that leaving a comment won't be noticed.

 

Thanks,

Ian

Answer 6

I fourth the request, profiling is a critical tool (go profiling team), not having it available for mobile applications is a bummer.

Is there a workaround?  a sample framework that could take the mobile application and run it, (gee an emulator, but maybe something simpler), sort of like running a Java Applet as an Application

Answer 7

Add me to the list of folks requesting a profiler for Windows Mobile apps,

preferably running on the actual device.  However, a target that's an emulator for a "typical"

mobile device would be better than nothing.

 

J. Hull

Answer 8

Count me in too, currently my workaround is to create a new desktop project and link my smart device source file to this project and then profile the desktop application with desktop profiler. Well it doesn't reflect the actual condition but it's better than nothing.

Answer 9

Count my vote in too... We really need to profile our mobile applications so that the performance can be bettered.

Answer 10

Same here, being able to profile a mobile application is an essential feature.

Answer 11

+1

Answer 12

Add me down for wanting a mobile profiler.

[EDIT]

Just saw this link on a new profiler in 3.5:

http://blogs.msdn.com/netcfteam/archive/2007/09/12/power-toys-for-net-compact-framework-3-5-ctp-released.aspx

Kudos go out to the Compact Framework team!

[/EDIT]

Answer 13

Hi Microsoft Team,   I am working on Windows Mobile 6.0. If there is a profiler support, it would have helped me alot in achieving good performance of my code in a efficient way. Hope u ppl ll come with new version of VS which supports this feature........     Thanks & Regards, satish

Answer 14

A profiler (incl. for C++ apps) would really be most helpful. I guess it also would be beneficial for Microsoft if we developers could improve the speed of our products, as after all this is what most users evaluate the platform on :-)

Answer 15

I too wanted a code-profiler for a very large mobile C# app we were building for a client. And like all of you I found out that there were none.

So, we simply built one ourselves :-)

We've used it for a year now on a large application (7-8000 methods in 40-50 DLLs) and found and fixed many performance bottlenecks. We've even integrated the profiling-step in our autobuild. It's an instrumenting profiler, so it works by injecting extra MSIL-instructions for timing into your application's assembly-files, but the profiling-step is very quick and the profiled code is typically only 40-50% bigger and runs 20-25% slower. This is mostly because we only time methods, not statements, but that's usually perfectly fine for making your slow code-spots stand out. Like pointing us to that place where an innocent variable, read in an inner loop, turned out to a property that cause an entire XPath-expression to be performed on an XML-document!

Two weeks ago we decided to make it generally available and now we've "packaged" it (I've even recorded a video-demo of how it works :-) and set it free. It's quite easy to use, even though there is not (yet) any Visual Studio integration.

You can get it at http://www.eqatec.com/tools/profiler

If you have any question or comments or suggestions then don't hesitate to mail me or follow-up in this thread. We hope that a code-profiler will be useful for others too, and depending on the interest we'll put more effort into it to make it even better.

Answer 16

Well please consider this as an extra vote (so long as it is not too late).  Also for profiling c++ apps on the WM platforms if that is not already supported (not found it yet).

Answer 17

I'd like to add my vote to this as well. Would be really awesome to be able to profile mobile apps, as performance and resource usage is really critical on those.

Answer 18

One more vote from me

Answer 19

So far more than 3 years passed and VS 2010 is close to release.

But anyone can tell me the profiling C/C++/C# for WindowsMobile is or will be supported on VSTS？

I really appreciate it.