Question

I have read and practiced the MSDN’s Profiler Tutorial. But I couldn’t find a way to profile a library solution (the button ‘Launch with profiling’ is disabled for libraries).

1. The only solution I could think of so far is to create an executable project just for profiling purposes.
2. I have already written unit tests for my library, using Visual Studio Team System’s Test Framework, so I imagine I could use them for profile, as Rick Minerich does with NUnit.

Anyone can point me the right direction?

Answer 1

It is possible to profile using your tests. You simply run the profiler on whatever is launching the tests and specify your to-be-profiled assemblies as the profiler targets. However, without knowing exactly what infrastructure you are using for both testing and profiling, it’s pretty much impossible to point you towards a solution.

Because I use NUnit, I’ll use it as an example. You could create a test category and call it profile tests. Then you could run nunit.exe from the profiler with the /include command line option to specify those tests:

nunit-console myassembly.dll /include:Profile 

You can use the Analyize->Performance Wizard to do this. The dll path would be your assembly and the Executable path would be the nunit-console command line as mentioned above.

I also know that ReSharper adds extensions to Visual Studio to do this for you. With it you can just right click on a test and select ‘Profile TESTNAME’. While it does cost money, I think that there is an evaluation version you could check out.

Also, just as a note, be sure to profile with Release libraries. Release and Debug often have MUCH different performance profiles.