This post is part of my series on development tools. There are way to many companies out there that do not offer their developers any tools what-so-ever and it is a real shame. If you’re a lone ranger then you need to get some cash and get these tools.

If you want to write high performance applications there are many things to consider and I’m not going to get into all the design aspects now. What I want to stress is that as human beings we just don’t have the capacity to predict everything our software is going to do when it runs. Using a profiler allows you to see exactly how your code is running and for web applications you can get a great idea where to optimize and also where to add caching.

Unfortunately there are no good free .NET code profilers out there but hey, very seldom is truely useful software just free :) The JetBrains and Red-Gate profilers are your best bet. I found the Ants profiler from Red-Gate to be the easiest to use and understand the output. Although JB’s profiler looks better, I went with more functional. The guys at RG are also easy to negotiate with so go bargin yourself a good price!

Here is the link for the Ants profiler, go give it a whirl. Screen shot below:

-c