Less than a year ago, I gave you a quick overview of the many investments we made to debugging and profiling in Visual Studio 2013 RTM and got some great feedback from you about what we’d done. Now, with Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 RCavailable for download, I wanted to run you through the enhancements we have made since last summer. We’ve done a lot, so this summary post mostly links to other posts.
I wanted to talk about two of the larger efforts we’ve made first: the Performance and Diagnostics hub (from where you can run tools such as the HTML UI Responsiveness tool, XAML UI Responsiveness tool, and Energy Consumption tool) and the ability to analyze .NET memory dumps.
With the Performance and Diagnostics hub, you now have the capability to run more than one tool at a time and look at the results in a combined view, so that you can cross-correlate activity from one tool with activity from another (e.g. "I can see that while my CPU was doing X, my UI was doing Y"). We’ve also introduced a new CPU Usage tool, for seeing where your .NET, C++, and JavaScript functions are using the CPU. And finally, we’ve added a Memory Usage tool for your .NET and C++ code to complement the JavaScript Memory tool we shipped previously.
Another large investment for VS2013 was the .NET memory dump tool, which includes the capability to inspect values of objects from the dump file. You can use this feature to investigate memory leaks with your Azure Web Site (new with Update 2 is the diffing capability for .diagsession files).
There are several other notable features, two of which I’ll call out:
- The ability to trigger prefetch during your Windows Store app development.
- The ability to better visualize strings containing JSON payloads with our JSON Debugger Visualizer.
We’ve also invested to add support for the Windows Phone 8.1 platform, bringing feature parity to diagnosing issues with your XAML and JavaScript apps on the phone just as you can for Windows Store app development today. There are a lot of posts we’ve made on this topic:
- Diagnosing issues with Mobile Websites
- Using the Performance and Diagnostics hub with Windows Phone 8.1
- Debugging support for Windows Phone 8.1
- Build 2014 talk: Diagnosing Issues in Windows Phone XAML Apps Using Visual Studio
- Build 2014 talk: Diagnosing Issues with Windows Phone JavaScript Apps Using Visual Studio
Finally, for those of you trying the .NET Native Preview, you will want to also read about our brand new Debugging support for .NET Native apps.
As always, your feedback and questions on diagnostics are welcome in the MSDN Diagnostics forum.