The last two weeks I was busy with the latest release of JustTrace. We had some hard times with JustTrace Q1 2013 release but after all we managed to fix a critical bug and we shipped SP1 after one week. There are a lot of new features in this release but I am going to focus on one thing only:
Visual Studio integration is out-of-process
If you use Visual Studio 2012 then you probably noticed a new process XDesProc.exe on your machine.
This is the new XAML UI Designer. Lets use Spy++ tool on the XAML designer in Visual Studio 2012 and see what’s interesting.
If you convert 0x1554 to decimal number you will get 5460 and that’s the XDesProc.exe process id shown on the screen shot above. So, what we see in Visual Studio is actually a window that belongs to XDesProc.exe process. Moving the XAML UI Designer out of Visual Studio has a lot of benefits – better isolation, improved performance and higher resource utilization. The same approach is used by Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome. You can read the full story about XDesProc.exe here.
So, why is it important to use out-of-process integration with Visual Studio? The short answer is more memory space. At present Visual Studio is 32bit process and this means that it can use at most 4GB (in most cases 2GB). This is a serious limitation for most profiling tools including JustTrace. For a long time, we wanted to move JustTrace out of Visual Studio and finally we did it. At the same time, JustTrace was built around the idea to provide seamless integration with Visual Studio. I am happy to say that the new JustTrace gives you the best of both worlds. Try it and give us your feedback.