http://blogs.msdn.com/mgoldin/archive/2010/04/26/vs2010-silverlight-4-profiling.aspx

Oren Nachman, our rockstar new perf SDET for Silverlight, is also an excellent source for Silverlight profiling tricks.

http://live.visitmix.com/MIX10/Sessions/CL60

First, my PDC slides and the video. This is the same talk that I gave at TechEd Iceland for profiling. 

I was recently reminded to post instructions on profiling Silverlight 4 with VS2010.

At PDC, I announced that Silverlight 4 came with the new CoreCLR capability of being profile-able by the VS2010 profilers: this means that for the first time, we give you the power to profile the managed and native code (user or platform) used by a Silverlight application. woohoo. kudos to the CLR team.

Sidenote: From silverlight 1-3, one could only use things like xperf (see XPerf: A CPU Sampler for Silverlight) which is very powerful to see the layout/text/media/gfx/etc pipelines, but only gives the native callstack.)

However, the version of VS2010 available at PDC unfortunately had a bug: it could not profile Silverlight. My PDC profile demo was saved from a VS2010 build with the fix... thus the delay in my posting instructions. I'm not sure when you'll get next the public drop of VS2010... but you'll run into a new problem: SL4 Beta did not publish symbols to the Microsoft Symbol Server.

I'll be sure to post a status on all of this by Mix (feel free to remind me).

If you happen to read this at a later point, when you have all the drops and symbols, then: Hello! What is the future like? You can use the below instructions:

1. admin-level VS prompt
2. cd /
3. vsperfclrenv /sampleon
4. set CORECLR_ENABLE_PROFILING=1
5. set CORECLR_PROFILER=%COR_PROFILER%
6. vsperfcmd /start:sample /output:myProfile.vsp
7. vsperfcmd /launch:"c:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe" /timer:100000
8. **    navigate, play with app, Shut down.
9. vsperfcmd /shutdown
10. before viewing, turn on the symbols server in VS2010 through: Tools-->Options-->Debugging-->Symbols-->check microsoft symbols server.
    (In the video, the symbols just point to a folder where I cache the internal symbols locally... not sure, but I don't think you guys can do that too.)
11. Open file in VS2010
    (Double-clicking in explorer will not work. VS2010 --> File --> open --> pick file.)

Try a few things:

1)      Use XamlReader.Load when you can (with the mini-language), which allows you to use the native parser and not managed code to create new shapes

2)      Use the mini-language for Paths or lines (whether using Xamlreader or C#) – both Silverlight and WPF optimize the mini-language internally, in different ways. When the mini-language is used, Silverlight does not create managed object for each PathFigure, Point etc– which saves creation time and space:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc189041(VS.95).aspx

Generally, for drawing massive number of shapes, you want to reduce the amount of time spent in managed creation time.

-Seema

http://videos.visitmix.com/MIX09/T17F

Demos:

• Demo project for building an invert shader 
• Demo project for using a transition effect 

Note that I deleted the original images from the project -- so, before pressing F5, replace trees.jpg and spring.jpg with actual images.
I'll post detailed steps shortly, but this should get most of you unblocked. Make sure to install the Pixel Shader Build Task before using (see below)

Pixel Shader Resources:

• WPF's Build Task for building Pixel Shaders in a VS template -- read the readme!
• Greg Schechter's great series of posts on building Pixel Shaders for WPF
• WPF Effects Library, which can also be used within Silverlight

Enjoy!
Seema

Understanding perf issues gives me an idea of how people are stretching the platform beyond our key scenarios, and which APIs/codepaths we should improve in the next version.

Tim Sneath wrote an excellent writeup of my 20min mix session on writing an optimized SL app. I almost wish that I had his post to read off as a script!

Talk Video & PPT: http://videos.visitmix.com/MIX09/T67M
Tim's great summary: http://blogs.msdn.com/tims/archive/2009/03/24/building-an-optimized-graphics-intensive-silverlight-application.aspx

Cheers, Seema

• Deep Dive into Silverlight Graphics, Thurs at 10:30-11:45am
• Building an Optimized, Graphics-Intensive Silverlight Application, Fri at 9:00 - 9:30am

Karen Corby has a great list of Silverlight-related sessions here, and you can build your session schedule here.

Cheers!
Seema

We’ve just published the sample source code for the Silverlight 2 Controls as shipped in the runtime and the SDK.

Within the RuntimeControls folder, you’ll see a Solution that contains three projects:

1.       SilverlightControls – One can edit the source and default control templates of the controls in order to build a DLL containing custom versions of the controls.

2.       Controls Sample – One can take the SilverlightControls DLL from #1 and include it in a project such as this. If you press F5, this app will launch displaying the controls created in #1.

3.       System.Windows.Design – This project is here largely for reference, it shows how to build a Design dll for VisualStudio and Expression Blend such that your custom controls would display within the toolbox.

Disclaimer: Note that we did take a small amount of changes in the Runtime Controls to get the project to properly build outside of our internal build environment.

In Silverlight 1.0, we use Lucida as the default font. For Silverlight 2 apps, we created a world-friendly font, called the Portable UI font (PUI!), which uses the Verdana glyphs for the Western characters and a variety of other glyphs for other languages.

Why? SL1 needed a web-friendly font. SL2 wanted to ship a font that looked great with our controls. The decision to use Lucida and Verdana depending on whether you host CLR was a compromise that I brokered between our designer, the text team, and the compat folks.

If you find yourself in a jam where you need to match the standard Silverlight 2 font, set the FontFamily to Verdana at the top of your application. If the characters are Western, we will use Verdana. If the characters are not supported by Verdana, it will fall back to our PUI.

(The issue in the linked post is a bug, we should detect that it is a Silverlight 2 app regradless of the extension. Let us know if you see any other variants of this bug, would love to hammer those out.)

Cheers, Seema