June 23rd, 2010

Features, Enhancements and Bug Fixes

This release of ANTS adds full support for profiling applications running under .NET 4 and Silverlight. It also adds a new very low overhead profiling mode, the ability to visualise when a method was active on the timeline and a command line tool.

Users running Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008 or later operating systems will also be able to record and analyse SQL and File I/O activity associated with their target application, as well as attach the profiler to running .NET 4 processes without restarting them.

It also includes the vastly improved IIS support, along with XBAP support, that we first shipped with ANTS Profiler 4.3.

ANTS Memory Profiler 5, also available from www.red-gate.com, is our new, completely rewritten memory profiler offering incredible performance and an unparalleled feature set.

Supported .NET Framework Versions

• 1.1
• 2.0
• 3.0
• 3.5
• 4.0
• Silverlight 4

The .NET 2.0 runtime must be installed in order for ANTS Performance Profiler to run.

Supported OS Versions

• Windows XP SP2 or later
• Windows Server 2003
• Windows Vista
• Windows Server 2008
• Windows 7
• Windows Server 2008 R2

Supports 32-bit and 64-bit versions of all listed OSs. Windows 2000 is no longer supported.

The following feature requires the .NET 4.0 runtime and Windows Vista or later:

• Attach to process

The following features require Windows Vista or later:

• File I/O counters
• SQL counters

The following feature requires the .NET 2.0 runtime or later:

• Sampled timings

Supported Visual Studio Versions

The following versions of Microsoft Visual Studio are supported by the ANTS Performance Profiler 6 add-in:

• Visual Studio 2005
• Visual Studio 2008
• Visual Studio 2010

System Requirements

• 512MB RAM (minimum)
• 1GB free hard disk space for profiler results

Known Issues

Line-level timings are not available for Silverlight applications.

Some cheaper motherboards have an issue with their high performance timer where it can jump backwards or forwards in time by significant periods. This can cause anomalous results to appear in ANTS Performance Profiler 6 because it relies on that timer to accurately measure application performance. If you experience this issue you should upgrade your motherboard drivers to the latest version.

A limitation in Windows means that it is not possible to successfully attach to a .NET 4 process more than once.

On Windows Vista (32 bit), if you are profiling Windows Services or websites on IIS, you may have to run ANTS Performance Profiler as an administrator.

If you have Internet Explorer 7 on Windows Vista or later, it is not possible to profile websites on IIS.

On Windows Vista and Windows 7, after profiling IIS using attach to process, ANTS Performance Profiler 6 sometimes cannot stop the session.  If this happens, restart ANTS Performance Profiler before starting a new profiling session. 

In some cases, Windows Services do not restart properly after profiling.

To profile an XBAP application, Internet Explorer must be set as your default browser and it must be closed before profiling.

Custom event markers are not available when profiling Silverlight applications.