In our previous tutorial we have seen how to use the inbuilt App monitoring feature to understand the performance of the application. In this tutorial we will see how to include the profiling options to understand the performance of the application developed for Windows Phone. The profiling feature provides all the metrics that are required to perform any relevant action on the performance issues. With profiling we can evaluate the execution of the application or memory usage aspects that are used by the application. This profiling can be used with the current version of Windows Phone 8 and also for the existing version of Windows Phone OS 7.1 [more]
Let us see how to do the profiling for an application from Visual Studio 2012 IDE. Open Visual Studio 2012 IDE in administrator mode and open an existing application which we developed in our previous articles as shown in the screen below.
Here are the steps we need to follow to start the profiling and stop it to analyze the log reports to get some performance optimization helps from the tool. To start the profiling service go to the DEBUG menu from the top ribbon menus and we can see an option Start Windows Phone Application Analysis or press Alt + F1 shortcut as shown in the screen below.
We can see a new windows opened with the name (F5debugHowto92_2013_07_22_17_22_52.sap) created in the solution explorer in the root folder which has the application monitoring features as shown in the screen below.
In the file created we can see the option Profiling which we can use to evaluate the applications performance. Click on the execution option and select the advanced settings to select the needed options as shown in the screen below. We can select between the 2 options as per the requirement, like we can select the profile based on the execution path or based on the Memory path which ever best suits your requirement.
Click on the Start Session (App will Start) link button at the bottom to start the profiling based on the execution option selected and starts the analysis for the application and we can see the application starts in the emulator and message shown in the same page as shown in the screen below.
After few minutes click on End Session (App will exit) from the link button and we can see the complete analysis report based on the profile filters added with the summary of issue if any as shown in the screen below.
We can proceed with the same steps for getting the profiling details based on the Memory and analyze to understand how the application exactly responds.