Windows Phone Mango–What’s New? (“Profiler” - Part 9 of 8)
This post is a “missing part” of series about new features in Windows Phone Mango 
New and very important feature of Windows Phone “Mango” Developer Tools is the profiler. The profiler enables the developers of Silverlight applications (currently only Silverlight scenarios are supported) to sense important heartbeats of the application and collect information about application behavior at runtime.
To measure the performance or the application, navigate to Debug menu option and select Start Windows Phone Performance Analysis:
Visual Studio provides the developer with configuration setting screen which enables him to define some profiling settings, like drawing details, depth of stack frames in each collection, data collection frequency and others:
Finally, when “Launch Application” button pressed, the application starts on selected target (Emulator or Device) and developer should execute the regular application flow (actions). Visual Studio collects the data in the background:
Profiling stopped by clicking “Stop Profiling” button; the application terminates and Visual Studio transfers the measured data into the developers’ PC for analyzing and graphical representation:
Once the data is ready it is presented to developer along with some warnings and recommendations based on application behavior:
Based on selection, and in addition to those warnings, the developer presented with detailed graphs of Draw Frame Rate, CPU and memory usage, running storyboard, images load and garbage collects. In addition, the lower part enables the developer to browse through various presentations of sampled data:
For example check which Visual elements were presented in each single frame and which visual types builds those elements:
hhich active storyboards running at specified period of time:
how log takes to render the application’s Visual Tree:
and many others.
Stay tuned for more posts to come.
Alex