I am developing an application and I will need to take measurements on different aspects, namely time spent in each method and the strain on system resources as well as doing the occasional bit of debugging to monitor how the data is processed.
I’ll be using an open source library for MIDI files that is available as source code as well as a compiled .DLL .
I was thinking whether it would be easier for me to use the compiled .DLL as I will not be making any changes to the library and it seems “tidier” than having a huge reference project in the source window however I wasn’t sure whether this would have any effect when it came to debugging and measuring the performance of the code.
Apologies if this question has already been asked, I tried a search and nothing seemingly relevant appeared.
It simply depends on if you think you’ll have to debug it at all. Performance measurements are less of an issue.
Note also that you can just get that source code, build it on your local machine and reference the dlls (and have the pdb files lying in the same directory). Then you’ll be able to debug it without actually adding the project to your solution. This is always possible if you have these three things:
But, again. If you think you won’t have to debug, just use the dlls straight away. You can always get the source later and rebuild.