Visual Studio 2008, Beta 2 (now with some of my code)

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Today we released Beta 2 of VS2008. This is the first public release from Microsoft that contains a nontrivial amount of code that I wrote (even though I haven't written too much code just yet). I had barely synched up the source tree and only fixed a couple of bugs when we released Beta 1 but now I've found my feet and am contributing more.

The major release announcements have focussed on the flashier (and admittedly very cool) aspects of the Beta like LINQ and some of the HTML editing and Javascript debugging features. However, us Profiler folks have also been toiling away adding new features and fixing bugs. Look out for things like (and some of these already featured in Beta 1, but they just keep getting better):

  • A promotion to the new Developer menu
     dev_menu
  • Hot path - find the critical path/paths through your call trees
    hotpath
  • Noise reduction - trim and/or fold your call trees so that they are easier to examine. See above for folding example.
  • Comparison reports - compare subsequent profiler runs to determine if code changes are improving performance
    comparison_reps
  • x64 OS support - profile on x64 Vista or W2K3 server 

If you can, please download it and let us know what you think. If you don't have the time at least take a look at the overview video showing some of the major features. You should also check out Ian's entry about controlling data collection while profiling. Hopefully I'll have time to go through some of the new profiler-specific features soon.