JetBrains has released version 5.0 of its dotTrace Performance .NET performance profiler. Aiming to align its product's power with many of the more dynamic real-time coding tools currently available, JetBrains has now enabled developers to attach the profiler to running processes on the fly. In this way, the company hopes to enable profiling potential performance issues as they appear in production.
Also ramped up is remote profiling technology so that dotTrace 5.0 Performance can help discover performance bottlenecks on production servers without having to deploy an entire profiler infrastructure. The company says that this provides more opportunities to profile .NET applications running in production environments.
"Customers have asked us to support dynamic attaching to and detaching from processes. It's a demand we couldn't ignore, which provides great new potential to discover issues in production," said Oleg Stepanov, JetBrains .NET division lead. "When your app has been running for hours or days and you need to find out why it's getting bogged down, dotTrace Performance comes to the rescue. You kick in the profiler when you actually need it."
For analyzing profiling results, dotTrace (a 2009 Jolt Award winner in the Utilities category) also provides booted code preview tools with an integrated decompiler also used in two other JetBrains products, ReSharper and dotPeek. As a result, even if source code is not immediately available, dotTrace Performance can now decompile the code of any function featured in a profiling snapshot, to help users understand what may have caused a certain performance problem.
Microsoft, for its part, does of course also supply a degree of developer support in terms of .NET performance profiling through its Microsoft Learning division and also through MSDN. That being said, the most-current links found in a simple Google search show content only as recently produced as 2004.
Other vendors will continue to compete in this space also; Red Gate Software offers its ANTS Performance Profiler featuring .NET code profiling, integrated SQL and File I/O analysis, and visualizations for a complete picture of application performance.