An End To .NET Guessing Games?

Software tools development company Red Gate says that it is sending a "clear message" to ASP.NET web developers to start pinpointing the exact reasons why code is running slowly.

The firm's ANTS Performance Profiler V8 has added web-request profiling to its set of capabilities. This advancement is designed to enable developers to use a single tool to understand database activity, web service requests and file system access within .NET code.

"The richness of information [here] means there's no more need to spend time trying to understand why data requests are being made, or manually relating requests with what's going on in your code," said Ben Emmett, product manager for ANTS Performance Profiler.

In addition to web-request profiling, ANTS Performance Profiler V8 has added a new feature called async profiling, which delivers new visibility into asynchronous coding.

NOTE: The MSDN provides the following commentary on asynchronous coding: Asynchrony is essential for activities that are potentially blocking, such as when your application accesses the Web. Access to a web resource sometimes is slow or delayed. If such an activity is blocked within a synchronous process, the entire application must wait. In an asynchronous process, the application can continue with other work that doesn't depend on the web resource until the potentially blocking task finishes.

"When looking at the performance of asynchronous code, other tools drop you into the unintelligible inner workings of .NET," says Elizabeth Ayer, .NET developer tools product manager. ANTS lets you make sense of it by showing your application's performance in the context of your own code. Time spent doing asynchronous work is no longer isolated from the code you write, making it much easier to determine performance issues," said Emmett.