Debugging and improving the efficiency C# winform code

Question

Hello everyone. I have written a Winform application in C#. How can I check the performance of my code. By that I mean, how can I check which forms references are active at a given time or event, so that I can remove them if they are not required (make them available for garbage collection). Is there a way to do it using VS 2005 or any free tool. Any tutorials or guide will be useful.

[Edit] Sorry if my question is confusing. I am not looking for a professional tool, but ways to know/understand the working of my code better and code more efficiently.

Thanks

Answer 1

Kobra,

What you're looking for is called a Memory Profiler. There happens to be one (paid) version for .NET aptly named ".NET Memory Profiler", I've not used it extensively but it should answer the questions you're asking. There are a few others ones which will do basically the same thing, like giving you instance counts of loaded types, and help you identify when instances are not being garbage collected for one reason or another (i.e. Event Handler References, Static Properties, etc).

Hope this helps,

Dylan

Answer 2

Red Gate Performance Profiler

...it's been said here a million times before. If you suspect performance issues, profile your application. It will tell you how long calls are taking and point out the bottlenecks in your code.

Answer 3

Making code efficient is always a secondary step for me. First I write the code so that it works. Next, I profile it if i am unhappy with the performance. The truth is most applications run fast enough after the first time writing them. Sometimes though, better performance is needed. Performance can be gained many different ways. It all depends on your application. I write LOB apps mainly, so I deal with alot of IO to databases, services and storage. These calls are all very expensive and need to be limited so they are my first area to optimize. I optimize by lazy-loading, eager-loading, batching calls, making less frequent calls and so on. I recently had a winforms app that created hundreds of controls dynamically and it took a long time. That's another bottleneck that I have to address. I use a profiler to measure the performance of the applications.

Use the free Equatec profiler. It will show you how long calls take and how many times a call is made. The profiler gives a nice report and visual display that can drill down the call stacks.