MIX 2011: What’s New in the Windows Phone Developer Tools

This mini-session was delivered by Vibhor Agarwal, Senior Program Manager from Microsoft.

Vibhor presented only the new Emulator enhancements and the new profiler provided in the next version of the developer tools.

Some of the new emulator enhancements:

• Memory model improvements
• Media support for H.264, AAC
• Sensor support – Accelerometer and Location

Vibhor showed a demo about the new accelerometer emulation:

and new location emulation:

Then, Vibhor presented how one can use the new profiler to analyze a windows phone application for finding performance issues.

The profiler has two supported modes, execution profiling and memory profiling. It was suggested that the memory profiler should be used only when you are sure this is actually a problem. The starting point should be the execution profiling.

We’ve seen several different graphs, including:

• Frame Rate graph
• CPU usage %
• Memory usage
• Storyboards
• Image loads

Of course, we can drill down and see how much CPU time we have spent in each function, like any normal profiler.

It should be noted that the profiler is a CPU sampling based profiler.

Also shown was the profiler analyzer that searches for common anti-patterns that developers sometimes use and recommends how to detect issues related to them.

All in all, very interesting presentation of an important tool.

That’s it for now,
Arik Poznanski.