Profiling .NET CF Applications With Eqatec

By Thomas Johnson | April 28, 2009

Today I found the Eqatec Profiler application which is a .NET profiler that works on compact framework applications. It’s quite easy to setup and it’s free. The interface for viewing the results is also very good allowing you to easily find the methods that are causing problems.

What Is A Profiler?

A profiler is a tool that allows you to examine your application to see which methods are running slowly. This allows you to spend your time optimising the methods that need it the most. Otherwise you can waste a lot of time optimising code that isn’t really causing the problem.

Profiling CF Applications On Mobile Devices

Eqatec is one of the only profilers that will work with CF application on mobile devices. Profiling is particularly useful on mobile devices due to their reduced memory and processing power. After running the profiler on a CF project I was able to easily reduce the application startup time by 25%.

Here is a basic guide to getting Eqatec working with a CF application.

1. Download The Eqatec Profiler

2. Setup the application in Eqatec

3. Build profiled version of your application

4. Deploy profiled version of the mobile device

This can be done using windows explorer or you can make it a little easier by setting up a bat file that uses CE Copy like this:

“C:\Program Files\Windows Mobile Developer Power Toys\CECopy\CECopy.exe” “C:\AppFolder\bin\Debug-Profiled\*.*” “dev:\Program Files\App Profiled”

5. Run your application and exercise the required features

You need to make sure you are running the profiled version of your app that was built by Eqatec. Once you’ve exercised the required features and closes the application a log/report file should be generated in “dev:\Temp\EQATECProfilerLogs”.

6. Copy the profiler generated log file from the mobile device to the PC

Again CE copy can be used here, the command for the default directories is:

“C:\Program Files\Windows Mobile Developer Power Toys\CECopy\CECopy.exe” “dev:\Temp\EQATECProfilerLogs” “C:\WINDOWS\Temp\EQATECProfilerLogs”

7. Analyse the log files in the Eqatec software

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