Find performance problems quickly and easily

When it comes to performance improvements I noticed two distinct factions: one that would tune every line of code and the other that would never do anything. Somewhere in the middle you will find performance tuning nirvana. Here you will tune only the most relevant areas of the code to maximize performance and minimize the time spent tuning.

It is often said that tuning 5% of your code will take care of 95% of your performance problems and my gut feeling tells me that it is probably true. Finding the relevant 5% is another story. You can certainly comb through tens of thousands of lines of code, pepper your functions with performance counters or simply use a profiler and let it tell you what you need to do. One of the best profilers I tried is ANTS Profiler.

Impressions

ANTS Profiler will make you feel like a performance optimization specialist. After a quick run through your application with the profiler running it will present a view of your source code with performance statistics for each line.  The time to run is displayed for each relevant line and a bar with the relative performance is displayed next to the slowest lines. You can instantly identify the line that takes the longest and if it is a function you can drill down into it to see exactly what line of code is causing the grief.

 

You can profile Windows applications, ASP.NET applications, COM+ applications and .NET Windows services so you should be covered from every angle.

 

ANTS Profiler is very easy to use with intuitive UI and proper options presented along the way.

 

Price

From $295 for the Standard edition up and $495 for the Pro edition. For more pricing and licensing details see the developer’s website.

Conclusion

A good profiler is a must have for any .NET developer and this is one of the best, 5 stars!

Get ANTS Profiler from here: http://www.red-gate.com/products/ants_profiler/

 

Are regular expression painful? Use The Regulator!

If you are like me you tried to avoid regular expressions and came up with the weirdest excuses in doing so. At first contact regular expressions seemed more like voodoo than programming. I wish I had a tool like The Regulator in those days.

Impressions

The Regulator is the missing link for regular expression development in any modern IDE. It provides a great way to develop, test and manage your regular expression code library.

 

Let’s look at some features:

- Intellisense – when you sort of know what you want but you don’t know what you need intellisense will pop up with a helpful list of options and explanations for the token at hand. Immensely helpful and dearly missed in other IDEs when working with regular expressions.

- Syntax highlighting – we take this for granted but it is a great help in troubleshooting problematic regular expressions.

- Code generation – automatically generates VB.NET or C# code. It would be nice to have support for other languages but I am feeling spoiled as it is.

- Performance analysis – compare different versions of a regular expression. An amazing feature and as far as I know unique to this tool!

- Community integration - integrates with regexlib.com to search, import and upload regular expressions.

The overall feel is of a professionally written application, well polished and very useful. I just wish Visual Studio would be as good as The Regulator when it comes to regular expressions!

Price

Free.

Conclusion

If you use regular expressions then you must give it a try, 5 stars!

Get The Regulator from here: http://tools.osherove.com/CoolTools/Regulator/tabid/185/Default.aspx

Also make sure to check out the RegExLib site here for many regular expression samples posted by the community: http://regexlib.com/default.aspx

 

 

 

 

What's in a pixel? Pixie can show you.

Pixie displays the color under your mouse pointer in various formats. Very useful for web developers.

Impressions

Pixie is one of those micro-tools you just add to your toolbox only to have it at your fingertips when you need it. It is extremely small in both file size and screen space footprint and focuses on only one thing: to show you the current color under your mouse cursor as conveniently as possible. There is a build-in magnifier window that you can activate as needed to aid you in tracking down that elusive pixel. You can also start the color picker dialog box to pick any color you might envision. Beyond these simple features and copying the current color into the clipboard this there isn’t much else Pixie can do.

Price

Free.

Conclusion

Other tools do the same job but none do it with more elegance than Pixie, 4 stars!

Get Pixie from here: http://www.nattyware.com/pixie.html