ANTS – A Great Profiler

We can get so object oriented and code reuse centric that we can slow the application down.  It can be like making SQL stored procedures and user defined functions object oriented – just a bad idea. 

Profilers have been around for many years but ANTS is very easy to use to get profiling results fast.  This isn’t exactly a plug for Red Gate, just a testimony of how well their product is.  I sparked up the ANTS profiler again on my most recent project.  It found some bottlenecks that weren’t completely apparent, even after some code walk-throughs. 

One of the biggest take-away with ANTS is how it shows code usage and the method processing time with so little effort.  ANTS easily identifies bottlenecks by showing your code usage and memory usage.  It’s worth a few hundred dollars to make a better product in the end.

Now if the CLR Profiler could do it as easy and as intuitively as ANTS.  I see that the newest CLR profiler API has some new features but it must be a intuitive, usable tool or we have to build something in C++ to profile something in C#.  That extra tool will likely never be in my project plans, although it does sound like a rewarding project.