We’re excited to announce the release of the WindowsPerf Visual Studio Extension v1.0.0, our first stable release after the beta. This version supports most of the available features related to sampling that are currently available on WindowsPerf 3.3.0 and brings new features, improvements, and bug fixes. The minimum required version of WindowsPerf for the extension to run is version 3.3.0 onwards.

This Linaro open-source project is available for download - to get started with the extension you can follow the guides on our detailed documentation wiki. The new sampling feature, built on WindowsPerf’s sampling model, allows for detailed performance analysis and displays hot spots in a process, helping developers target and rectify performance bottlenecks. Users can easily navigate through this feature in the familiar Visual Studio 2022 environment.

What is WindowsPerf?

WindowsPerf is a (Linux perf inspired) lightweight Windows on Arm performance profiling tool. Profiling is based on ARM64 PMU (Performance Monitor Unit) and its hardware counters.

What’s New

Improved Sampling Settings

• Added support for selecting multiple events per run, allowing users to sample all selected events simultaneously.
• Introduced support for project target payloads. When opening the Sampling Explorer settings, users can now select the current project build target (Debug | Release, arm64, arm64ec, etc.), and the extension will automatically launch the built resource from that configuration.
• To address the large list of events, we’ve added an autocomplete component that helps filter down the list of events in the selection input.
• Realigned the command preview to match WindowsPerf 3.3.0 version.

Disassembly Features

• Added disassembly output from sampling runs to the Sampling Explorer widget, providing users with the opportunity to dive deeper into the most frequently executed instructions.
• Enhanced the editor by adding line highlighting to better identify hotspots directly in the codebase.
• Improved the percentage display in the Sampling Explorer table.

Fixes

• Fixed typos, alignment issues, and errors in form validation.
• Improved the stability of the tool, especially the Sampling Explorer and search features.

Docs and Community

• Updated our documentation and added new tutorials and videos. Check out the new docs on our Wiki page.

We hope you enjoy the new features and improvements! You can find out more by visiting our repository. We’re always looking to make things better, so your feedback through issues or merge requests is always welcome.