In Visual Studio 2013, the team unified the performance and diagnostics experience (memory profiling, etc.) under one umbrella and named it Performance and Diagnostics Hub. Available under the Debug menu, this option reduces lot of clutter in terms of profiling client and server side code during a debug operation. There was lot of visual noise in the IDE in the 2012 version and the hub is a significant addition in improving developer productivity.
In the Performance and Diagnostics hub, you may select the target, and specify the performance tools with which you would want to run diagnostics. There are various tools that you can use to start capturing the performance matrices like CPU Usage and Memory Allocation. You can collect CPU utilization matrices on a Windows forms based or WPF application.
The latest release of Update 3 brings with it some key enhancements to the CPU and memory usage tools. In the CPU usage tool, you can now right-click on a function name that was captured as part of the diagnostics and click View Source. This will allow you to easily navigate to the code that is consuming CPU in your application. The memory usage tool now allows you to capture memory usage for Win32 and WPF applications.
The hub will also allow you to figure hot paths in the application code that might be causing more CPU cycles and may need refactoring.
You can also look for functions that is doing most work as illustrated in the figure below.
Overall, the Performance and Diagnostics hub has become a useful arsenal for developer productivity and catering to non-functional aspects of the application scope.
