What is Visual Studio PerfWatson?

Would you like your performance issues to be reported automatically? Well now you can, with PerfWatson extension! Install this extension and  assist the Visual Studio team in providing a faster future IDE for you.

We’re constantly working to improve the performance of Visual Studio and take feedback about it very seriously. Our investigations into these issues have found that there are a variety of scenarios where a long running task can cause the UI thread to hang or become unresponsive. Visual Studio PerfWatson is a low overhead telemetry system that helps us capture these instances of UI unresponsiveness and report them back to Microsoft automatically and anonymously. We then use this data to drive performance improvements that make Visual Studio faster.

Here’s how it works: when the tool detects that the Visual Studio UI has become unresponsive, it records information about the length of the delay and the root cause, and submits a report to Microsoft. The Visual Studio team can then aggregate the data from these reports to prioritize the issues that are causing the largest or most frequent delays across our user base. By installing the PerfWatson extension, you are helping Microsoft identify and fix the performance issues that you most frequently encounter on your PC.

To allow PerfWatson to submit performance reports to Microsoft, please make sure that Windows Error Reporting (WER) is enabled on your machine, please see how to configure WER setting session. PerfWatson employs the WER service to send the collected data to Microsoft.

Using PerfWatson

PerfWatson is an automatic feedback service.  Once it is installed, all you need to do is use the product, and it will automatically create an error report for every UI delay you experience in the product.  It stores these error reports  in %LOCALAPPDATA%\PerfWatson. This data is then submitted to Microsoft on next Visual Studio launch.

If your Windows Error Reporting permissions are set to Automatically check for solutions and upload data, the performance reports will be submitted to Microsoft automatically. Otherwise, PerfWatson will prompt the user for permission to send the collected data. This prompt can be disabled by checking “Do not show this dialog again. Report problems automatically” on the dialog.

In September, there was a post on the blog that introduced the VSPackage Builder, a tool for VS extension developers that provides a designer experience over the Visual Studio Command Table (VSCT) file.

 

In particular, Package Builder makes it easy to add commands and UI to the VSCT incrementally – a task that’s proven somewhat challenging to many extenders. Another article, by Ty Anderson, that shows off those incremental features was published recently on DevX.com. Check it out!

You can download VSPackage Builder from the Visual Studio Gallery.

1.  Install the extension.  You can use the Extension Manager dialog inside Visual Studio (Tools\Extension Manager) and search for “visual studio color theme editor”, or you can download the VSIX file from

 
2.  Create a new theme.  After you install the extension and launch Visual Studio, you should see a new top-level menu called Theme.  The two themes that ship with Visual Studio 2010 are available by default.  The Default theme is the Visual Studio 2010 blue theme, and the High Contrast theme is the theme used when a Windows high-contrast theme is selected.  The High Contrast theme is built entirely of Windows system theme colors, and as such has a limited palette.  There are also three custom themes created as examples—feel free to use them as starting points for your own themes.


Choosing “Customize Colors…” brings up the dialog that will let you create a new theme.  The built-in themes are not editable, but you can create a new theme using the hyperlink in the information bar or the toolbar button on the far left.

Visual Studio Code Map is a Visual Studio 2010 extension that displays a graphical nested representation of the current editor window code (C# and VB.NET). It helps the developer visualize type nesting, implemented interfaces, regions, member type and scope, as well as quickly navigate to their respective position in the code editor.