What features should a C#/.NET profiler have?

Question

This could be a borderline advertisement, not to mention subjective, but the question is an honest one. For the last two months, I\'ve been developing a new open source profiler

Answer 1

My requirements:

• Collect stats without impact to application - e.g. don't fill up memory, allow data to be collected away from apps under question
• Ability to specify measurements simply and repeatably (data driven)
• Automatable so that I can repeat measurements without point and click, and without UI
• Enable us to understand issues related to the WPF and other declarative technologies such as DLR or WF
• No installation - no gac, msi etc, even better if can be run over a network
• Support 64 bit from outset
• Don't try to know all the the analysis that could be done - encourage an ecosystem. If the raw stats can be analysed using other tools so much the better.
• UI if any should be good - but its the stats that matter. So don't spend time on that, get the core profiling good.
  • Support profiling of apps that are not straight exe's like services and web applications simply.

would likes:

• Consider cross app support - big apps often need to understand apps performance behavior across many executables. If your profiler allows easy correlation of this data then so much the better