How To Do Performance Profiling in Visual Studio 2008 "Pro"

Question

Microsoft make this piece of software called "Visual Studio 2008 Professional". I have found that there doesn't appear to be an application performance profiler or something similar in it, making it seem not so "professional" to me.

If Microsoft don't include a profiler, what are your third party options for time profiling for Visual Studio 2008? Free would be preferable, as this is for uni student purposes :P

Answer 1

There are a couple of free profilers, not as complete or polished as the commercial ones, but they can definately help a lot:

Eqatec - This was designed for Windows CE, but works just fine for normal applications.

Soft Prodigy Profile Sharp - This is actually an open source project written in c#, so you can tinker with it if you want.

Answer 2

Personally, I use the Red Gate profiler.

Others swear by the JetBrains one.

Those seem to be the options, and there isn't much between them.

Answer 3

I use JetBrains dotTrace profiler. This is a commercial profiler. (Full disclosure: I receive a free licence as an MVP. It has proved very useful though.)

There's also the free CLR Profiler for .NET 2.0 and an article explaining how to use it.