Re: Interested in development

[email protected] wrote:

> I have found nprof very useful in my project and feel I could help out a
> little to make it a more complete profiler. It would fill in a very
> important void - it's quite surprising there isn't a good free .NET 
> profiler around. 

I agree with that one.  That's nprof's goal!  ;)  I'm hoping to get 
nprof to the point where we can have a few active developers keeping it 
up-to-date with the needs of .NET programmers.

> Does there exist a TODO list/Roadmap already?

Yep - it's in CVS right now as TODO.txt:

http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/nprof/nprof/TODO.txt?view=markup

It's *mostly* up-to-date, though there are a few items that I was 
planning on adding to that when I have a chance.

> Some features I sorely missed:
>   - starting and stopping the profiler at any time while the prgram is
>     running. 

+1  Profiler snapshots is my number one feature to be implemented before 
the 1.0 release.  No profiler can be complete without this feature.

>   - the profiler (while profiling my fully C# based simulator) was very
>     very slow to run the program. Would like to know if it would be
>     useful to tune some parameters and tradeoff profiling accuracy with 
>     running time.

This would be cool, but I'm not certain which profiling parameters we 
could remove.  If you've got an idea of what you statistics might want 
to see for a "quick profiler", let me know.

>   - *save* a profiler run. this is a must. I had to take screenshots to
>     save my output. :-)

Josh is currently working on saving profiler project information right 
now (without the runs themselves) - we hope to nail down the final file 
schema to handle multiple profiler snapshots within a single run soon. 
I'm wary of letting people save their results until I can be sure we can 
import them into future versions.  :)

With any luck we'll have the API behind the scenes to support multiple 
profiler snapshots in a single run, even if the profiler itself doesn't 
support it.  If we can get this up-and-running before 0.9, I think we 
can easily enable full load/save.

>   - Back/Forward facility when one 'double-clicks' on the
>     _lvFunctionInfo list items. That is, when I see details of a
>    function and its children, I go down and keep on double-clicking on
>    the children to find more information - however, there is no way to
>    return back! So I have to remember which function I started with.

+1  I've wanted this for a while.  It actually existed just before I 
release 0.0, but I couldn't get it to work well enough to put it in. 
It'd be much easier to put it in with the current GUI interface.

> Let me know what you guys think.

Sounds great!  Did you want to work on the back/forward functionality in 
the profiler grid?  That would probably be an easy place for you to 
start within the code.

> However, I am quite new to developing Windows based applications. (but,
> am an experienced programmer.) In particular, I was having a little hard
> time getting some GUI enhancements to work with the current 0.8b-alpha
> version of nprof. It'd be great if there were a small tutorial to help
> in this regard. Also, it's just a little bit hard to follow the code
> since the "overall picture" kinda of documentation doesn't exist. 

There's a brief project architecture overview here:

http://nprof.sourceforge.net/Site/Description.html

Perhaps I could put this into CVS and keep it up-to-date better.

Matt.


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