First code profiler for Silverlight

Theres no sound in silverlight version (works fine in WMV link).

It looks like a really nice tool.  I'll definitely have to try this out as I'm learning silverlight.

Very interested in hearing from users of this and their experience with it. Unfortunately despite a lot of Twitter publicity when this first launched it turns out that the trial version excludes Silverlight functionality, and the Pro license has to be purchased to even try it out.

To clarify the restriction we've included this note on the EQATEC website: "The profiler you download is the full, Silverlight-capable version. However, only a Professional or Corporate license will reveal the method-names in a Silverlight application. That's the only difference: the functionality and behavior of the profiler is not crippled in any other way."

So you can indeed download and try out the Silverlight functionality - it just doesn't tell you the actual names of the profiled methods unless you have a license. Also, everything else (full .net and netcf profiling) is fully functional in all versions and completely free for non-commercial use - only the Silverlight functionality is restricted by license (because frankly, we also have to make a living).

The download-page has a couple of screenshots to clarify the difference: http://www.eqatec.com/tools/profiler/download

Thanks to EQATEC we finally have a profiling experience to complete the development life cycle. They were as kind to donate a professional license to the Balder project and we will certainly make use of the license and get Balder even faster. 

I did a fast review of it, just showing some of the features after just 24 hours of having it available that can be read here.

Thanks for the responses.

Charles, Thanks for forwarding.

Eqatec,

Thanks. The Trial Download trial page clarification makes things much clearer. The pricing page of your current site still has the same wording  that caused all the confusion in the first place (not helped by so many people tweeting about it being a 'free' Silverlight profiler) and still states  "only the Professional license [and above] unlocks Silverlight 2 and above profiling" which is somewhat different from "unlocks method names in the Silverlight profilng".  Anyway, it's great that the limitation isn't the big hurdle to evaluating the product it appeared to be. 

Totally understand your reasons for moving from being a free product to a paid license one, and your pricing seems reasonable if the product does "what it says on the tin"

The reason I wasn't prepared to just trust you with a couple of hundred dollars was that the last Silverlight Profiler I looked at had a 14-day trial where even the most basic functionality didn't work and the response from their support people was "Yes the installation software is broken. We're looking at it". A month later I've still heard nothing further and am glad I hadn't just rushed to buy the product based on spec.  Looking forward to playing with the trial version of your product and purchasing a license next payday, especially given the excellent review from the Balder project and a tweet I saw from Tim Heuer who seemed to like it.

Einar,

Good to see such an enthusiastic review  (and I appreciate your being honest about the review being based on a free license - not everyone's so honest). Thanks for taking the time to write it

Ian,

You bring up some good points regarding the wording, so we've just cleared up the confusion on the pricing page. "Unlocking" was clearly confusing, I agree.

We chose the "hide method-names" limitations because of two reasons: 1) so we didn't need to implement an elaborate, hack-safe, time-expiring licensing mechanism at all and 2) we want you to be able to run it completely on your real application. It's so annoying when you can't really evaluate something because it will only work with 10 items or only 5 times or not save to disk etc etc. Simply not revealing the method-names seems rather benign.

I think I've tried to evaluate the other profiler you mention, but aborted when it required me to download the 350MB Silverlight SDK. And as our profiler forum shows we're also a bit more responsive

And Einar, once again thanks for the stunningly fine review. We should have you update our user manual  It's somewhat funny that your last blog entry, before running the profiler, talked about how you've really tweaked and tweaked the code for a long time to get better performance, and now you go and make it run several times faster in just one day. Good luck to Balder from us.

Good to see the prompt responses on your own forums. I just purchased a Professional License and look forward to using the product on some real Silverlight projects over the next few weeks. 

Will you guys be at MIX? Seems like a lot of your potential customers will be there so a good opportunity for you to demo the software "live".

Thanks for clarifying everything here.

Ian

Is BulkObservableCollection part of .Net? I couldn't find it.

Ian,

Great! I really hope you'll find it useful, even now when the expectation has been set quite high

I don't think we'll be at MIX, unfortunately, but it sure could be interesting. And if somebody out there would like to include the profiler in their presentation then they're more than welcome, and also welcome to contact us for more info.

rdzikowski,

no, BulkObservableCollection is not part the Silverlight standard libraries. Sorry for not making that clear. We've rolled our own and you can find implementations many places, e.g.  here: http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/blogs/tamir/archive/2008/05/13/how-to-addrange-removerange-in-silverlight-observablecollection-lt-t-gt.aspx

Well, their .NET CF profiler is not as good as they say, it doesn't work for me at all

Hi IuriiO, Please let us know what the problem is (support@eqatec.com). It's hard to fix problems that haven't been reported. We strive to fix all problems reported as fast as possible.