What are some tools/practices used to measure performance with Silverlight?
I am interested in the performance costs of rendering certain xaml objects as well as algorithms I have written. I was about to start writing my own classes for this, but I thought I would ask here first.
Thank you in advance.
Currently, just build it and then play with it. Since its client-side as long as its reasonable responsive the job is done.
Have a look at Silverlight Spy 2. There are Events, Network, and Performance tabs that might give you some of the information you're looking for.
dotTrace by JetBrains is a good tool for measuring performance of ASP.NET applications. Not sure how much it will help you with Silverlight, but will at least analyze your back-end code
There are a few free profilers, EQATEC isn't bad, which might do what you need. If you can afford it, AQTime has become my favorite commercial profiling tool and I expect would do the trick nicely. They have a demo. I do recommend trying all the profilers out there before purchasing any of them, if you have the time, if only to know what you are missing with any particular choice because there are some substantially different features among them, and none of them seem to have everything.
Our company released a Silverlight code profiler today (EQATEC Profiler 3.1). You can now easily measure performance through method timing. As the first and only profiler in the world it supports all .NET platforms (full, compact and Silverlight).