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.

We are excited to announce that Microsoft ADO.NET Entity Framework 4.1 Release Candidate (EF 4.1 RC) is now available. This is a fully supported, go-live release. In approximately one month we plan to release the final Release to Web (RTW). We are not planning any changes to the API surface or behavior between RC and RTW, the release is purely to allow any new bugs found in the RC build to be evaluated and potentially fixed.

What’s in EF 4.1 RC?

ADO.NET Entity Framework 4.1 RC introduces two new features:

• The DbContext API is a simplified abstraction over ObjectContext and a number of other types that were included in previous releases of the ADO.NET Entity Framework. The DbContext API surface is optimized for common tasks and coding patterns. DbContext can be used with Database First, Model First and Code First development.
• Code First is a new development pattern for the ADO.NET Entity Framework and provides an alternative to the existing Database First and Model First patterns. Code First is focused around defining your model using C#/VB.NET classes, these classes can then be mapped to an existing database or be used to generate a database schema. Additional configuration can be supplied using Data Annotations or via a fluent API.

As of this week, Visual Studio 2010 SP1 is now available for download!  The service pack was released to MSDN subscribers on March 8 and became generally available on March 10.  SP1 includes fixes that improve reliability and address the most commonly-reported customer bugs.  It also adds some of the most requested feature improvements, including a new local help viewer, IntelliTrace support in more scenarios, and built-in Silverlight 4 tooling.

For more information, check out the following blog posts and links:

• Download link for Visual Studio 2010 SP1
• Announcement of SP1 on Jason Zander’s Blog
• List of changes in SP1 for Visual Studio
• List of changes in SP1 for Team Foundation Server (TFS)
• Information about SP1 compatibility
• Official VS 2010 SP1 Readme

Enjoy!

I’m happy to announce that as of 10:00 AM PST the final version of the Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 (SP1) is available for download! MSDN subscribers can download the bits immediately with general availability on Thursday, March 10.

• Download Service Pack 1 (MSDN Subscribers)
• Thursday's general availability download is here.

As described with the SP1 Beta post, in this release we have addressed some of the most requested features from customers of Visual Studio 2010 like better help support, IntelliTrace support for 64bit and SharePoint, and included Silverlight 4 Tools in the box. We also added unit testing support on .NET 3.5 and a new performance wizard for Silverlight, among other changes.

We concentrated heavily on fixing issues you reported, including the top voted issues from Connect. The full list of changes can be found in theVisual Studio and Team Foundation Server knowledge base articles. You can also find information about  SP1 compatibility, SP1 Readme, and general information about SP1 in the Visual Studio Dev Center.

Today we also announced the immediate availability of two new feature packs for MSDN Subscribers:

• Team Foundation Server Project Server Integration Feature Pack – Integration between Project Server and Team Foundation Server is a considerable advancement for organizations that want to bridge the collaboration gap between the Project Management Office and software development teams.
• Visual Studio 2010 Load Test Feature Pack – Enables web performance and stress testing throughout the application lifecycle with unlimited virtual users.

Since the launch of Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4, we have continued our momentum of focusing on improving the developer experience. Thanks to all of you who have provided feedback along the way.

I hope you enjoy these releases!