A quick update; last night I posted the final ANTS Profiler early access build. You can get it from:
http://www.red-gate.com/messageboard/viewforum.php?f=80New features and updates include:
- Visual Studio add-in, supporting Visual Studio 2005 and 2008
- Performance counter selection in setup dialog, and switching on timeline
- Thread selection
- Child process selection, although this is admittedly rather flaky
- Printing the call graph
- Exporting the call graph to PNG and EMF; we were planning to support export to PDF in this build as well, but unfortunately, although the code is there, you'll get an exception if you try it because a rather crucial dependency is missing. This will be in the beta.
- Various presentation improvements on the call graph.
- Suggestion of possible methods for optimisation.
The last item is something we added because people kept asking for it, but frankly, I'm
not entirely convinced of its usefulness. At the moment it's only available in the call tree. If ANTS Profiler thinks you
might be able to optimise a method it will add a small red asterisk
after the method name. I tested this on a known performance
issue in the printing support, along with a couple of other test
applications, and it did indeed identify the correct methods for
optimisation, however that's not to say it will always do so (in fact I'd be enormously surprised if it did), so if you
find it unhelpful or irritating you can switch it off via the Tools
menu.
The build will expire on or about Sunday 3rd August, which coincidentally is the day before we plan to release the beta. There is still a lot of work to do before we get there, and I'm hoping I don't end up eating my words on this one—I'm sure many of you are aware of exactly how reticent I am about publishing hard dates.
We're hoping the beta will be feature complete, but anticipating that Andrew and I will be relatively slack throughout August, I might rearrange the work a little so that some of the less important features will be included after the beta. We're going to add in a lot of the documentation as well, in terms of interactive help, although online help will still be sparse at the very best. We've got one of our best technical authors, Paul, working on this right now, and having discovered exactly how bad some of the built-in descriptions for the performance counters are, it's certainly fair to say he's got his work cut out for him.
The beta will also include licensing, although it's likely that the subsequent release candidate will simply reset the trial period, so it's not something you should have to worry about.
That's it for now!