Marc (the QA lead) and myself (the Dev lead) of the VSTS profiler are sitting in front of Booth Dev-2 (Visual Studio Team System) in the Technical Learning Center.

The TLC should be opening up soon to customers, so I'd like to encourage you all to drop by.  We'll be happy to help you profile your app or answer any questions you may have.

Also, mark your calendars as Marc and I will be delivering a Breakout Session entitled DEV313 - Improving Code Performance with Visual Studio Team System.  We'll be covering a little bit of education about how to interpret the data coming out of the profiler and giving LOTS of demos of great new profiler scenarios in the next version including:

Web/Load Test integration

Comparing two performance reports

Filtering

Line level sampling

and many more.

So I arrived in Thailand for Visual Studio Launch which will be in BecTero Hall here in Bangkok on Tuesday morning (tomorrow as I write this).  I hope to see all of our Thai developers there.  I spent the morning getting ready for a presentation and waiting for the torrential downpour to finally stop.  When it finally stopped, I went and checked out Pan Tip Plaza, the giant IT shopping complex and I wandered around the nearby shopping districts until I couldn't stand the heat anymore.  It is 93 degrees here... and this is the cold season! 

Anyways, let's talk food.  I had a great meal tonight at a place called Benjarong.  They specialize in Thai Royal Cuisine and so I had to check it out.  I got the set menu.  9 courses, $20, and more food than any one person could actually eat.  So anyways, the second course was this amazingly tasty Tom Yum Gung.   Really good stuff, with these giant cloves of garlic and what looked like little green beans floating in it.  I bite into the "green bean".  The world flashes white.  Extreme agony in my lips and tongue.  I am on fire.  I actually yelp.  It's actually a tiny green chili.  A tiny green chili... of DEATH!  No matter what you read in books, in situations like this if there is a glass of ice water in front of you, you are going to drink that glass of ice water.  And of course, the books will be right and this will make it worse.  And now you are really in trouble.

The wait staff notices my distress and (bless their hearts) bring me ice cream to ease my pain.  Remember that this is only course 2 of 9.  Lest any of you think I am some lightweight making a big deal out of nothing, I will tell you that my wife is Thai.  When we dine with my in-laws, my mother in law actually makes 5 different types of fish sauce for putting on each dish to control the spice level.  The pecking order is:

Mama Bear (my mother in law can eat fire.)
Papa Bear (fire with a splash of lime.)
Steve (hot enough to earn the respect of my mother in law)
Sister Bear (my wife, medium)
Brother Bear (my brother in law, a total wuss.)

Anyways, the ice cream did its job and thank god because there was some amazing dishes still to come although my lips are still in a little bit of pain.  For future reference, the chili was a Prik Kee Nuu Suan.  Beware!

I have to get back to working on these slides.  Hopefully I'll have some good customer stories tomorrow.  Come out and see us tomorrow at the launch event.  I've been practicing the little bit of Thai I've picked up from my family. :) (Aahaan thai phet khrup!)

I just noticed that the Visual Studio Profiler docs are up on msdn2. 

Here's a good list of what each column means in English.

https://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms148209

https://cc.msnscache.com/cache.aspx?q=2268729578875&lang=en-US&FORM=CVRE10

One optimization that is particularly tough for the profiler is called COMDAT folding. There's a good explanation of this from a debugger standpoint here: https://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2005/03/22/400373.aspx

The basic concept is that at link time, all identical functions at code generation time are folded in to a single copy of that function. This is particularly useful for limiting the code bloat in template code. You will see COMDAT in action with things like default destructors and simple methods like field accessors. Since there is only one copy of that function in the binary with several source level functions associated with it, if we take a sample in it, there is no way for us to know which is the correct function. So we just pick the first one in the list, just like the debugger.

Hope that helps!]]> https://docs.microsoft.com/archive/blogs/scarroll/meltdown-profiler-tips-and-tricks-talk-details Thu, 21 Jul 2005 21:18:00 GMT https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/scarroll/2005/07/21/meltdown-profiler-tips-and-tricks-talk-details/ https://docs.microsoft.com/archive/blogs/scarroll/profiling-faq-5-why-are-there-two-copies-of-my-function-in-instrumentation-mode-function-report Thu, 21 Jul 2005 21:10:00 GMT https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/scarroll/2005/07/21/profiling-faq-5-why-are-there-two-copies-of-my-function-in-instrumentation-mode-function-report/ https://docs.microsoft.com/archive/blogs/scarroll/speaking-at-ms-meltdown-about-the-vs-profiler Thu, 30 Jun 2005 18:21:00 GMT https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/scarroll/2005/06/30/speaking-at-ms-meltdown-about-the-vs-profiler/ Microsoft Meltdown 2005 conference at the end of the month. The topic is tips and tricks for using the Visual Studio Profiler. Since this is a game developer audience, I'm going to try to tailor this talk to your needs and go in to how to do some more advanced stuff with the API and the command line tools.

If you've got something you really want to see covered in this talk, now's the time to post a comment or drop me some mail.

When we get closer I'll put a quick talk outline so you can smack me down if I am talking about stuff you don't care about.

]]> https://docs.microsoft.com/archive/blogs/scarroll/public-chat-this-wednesday Mon, 13 Jun 2005 22:56:00 GMT https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/scarroll/2005/06/13/public-chat-this-wednesday/ Hey folks.  We have a public chat scheduled for tomorrow.  I just checked the schedule and we have a bunch of the devs, testers, PMs, who are responsible for the dev and test skus of Team System signed up to be on for tomorrow's chat.  If you've never tried it before I think this would be a good time to test the waters.  If you have any burning question about our technology or even if you just want to yell us (constructively), this will be a great time to get your voices heard.  Of course, we read every single bug and suggestion and forum post that customers send us, but I think the chat format is more of a dialogue, since you can more easily ask a real person followup questions.

Team System Developer & Test SKUs Public Chat

Every 3^rd Wednesday of the Month @ 10am PST

Join us to discuss the Profiler, Test Tools (Unit, Generic, Manual), Web Load Testing, and Code Analysis (FxCop & PREFast).  We have questions for you, will answer questions from you, and will chat about the exciting new technology.

https://msdn.microsoft.com/chats

 

 

A census taker knocks on Mary’s door. 
Census Taker: I need to know the age of your three children
Mary: The product of their ages is 36.
Census Taker: hrmmm
Mary:  The sum of their ages is the same as my house number.
Census Taker: I still don’t have enough information.
Mary: The younger two are twins
Census Taker: Ok, I’ve got it now.

What are the ages of Mary’s children?

ANSWER IS NOW IN THE COMMENTS (along with a afterschool special style wrapup of what we've learned).