14 DAY TRIAL // Acting on tester feedback, Microsoft postponed the RTM of Visual Studio 2010 in order to deal with poor performance issues.
But undoubtedly, not all problems were resolved, not even after the release of the first upgrade for the product earlier this year.
This is why the Redmond company provides Visual Studio PerfWatson. Designed to play nice with Visual Studio Service Pack 1 (SP1), Visual Studio PerfWatson streamlines the harvesting and reporting of performance-related feedback.
The software giant is inviting developers using VS 2010 SP1 to install the PerfWatson extension and help boost the speed of the IDE.
“When the tool detects that the Visual Studio UI has become unresponsive, it records information about the length of the delay and the root cause, and submits a report to Microsoft,” revealed Selma Ikiz, a PM for the Code Editor in Visual Studio.
“The Visual Studio team can then aggregate the data from these reports to prioritize the issues that are causing the largest or most frequent delays across our user base. By installing the PerfWatson extension, you are helping Microsoft identify and fix the performance issues that you most frequently encounter on your PC.”
The PerfWatson low overhead telemetry system requires devs to have Windows Error Reporting (WER) enabled.
According to Microsoft, the tool only works with Visual Studio 2010 SP1 (Professional, Premium, or Ultimate) installed on Windows 7 and Windows Vista.
Microsoft’s David Berg, DDPE reveals that the software giant has been dogfooding PerfWatson, and that the extension has already helped built speed enhancements for Visual Studio.
“But our usage patterns aren't the same as yours. Everyone uses VS a little bit differently. That's why we're excited to put Perf Watson in your hands so that we can get an accurate picture of the performance issues you're running into, with strong metrics and data to back up the work we need to do,” Berg stated.
The promise is that PerfWatson will help Microsoft prioritize the real world performance issues that impact developers.
Visual Studio PerfWatson is available for download here.
Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 (SP1) RTM ISO and Installer are available for download here.