TIP support for any ADO.NET app

In my last post, I discussed the benefits of the Tier Interaction Profiler found in Visual Studio 2010 Premium. If you are accessing a database via ADO.NET APIs ( which includes the new Entity Framework 4.0 features ), you can get the same benefits from TIP.

If you recall, one of the last pages in the performance wizard was a simple checkbox allowing you to collect TIP data. Unfortunately, if your project is not a web app or web site, performance wizard doesn’t include the option to turn Tier Interaction Profiling on.

You can manually configure your performance session to collect TIP data by right clicking on the Performance session in the Performance Explorer, select “Properties”, and then click on the “Tier Interactions” entry in the property pages window, as seen in the following image:

To create a new performance session, you can either create it through the perf wizard, or select the “Analyze->Profiler->New Performance Session” menu item, which will result in an empty performance session inside the Performance Explorer tool window:

From here, simply right click on the “Targets” folder and select a project or binary to associate the performance session with.

Cheers!

Cameron