WPF Performance Suite Visual Profiler does not work

Question

I have installed the latest Windows 7 SDK which contains the WPF Performance Profiler.

Perforator does display some data when I launch my app, but the Visual Profiler does not display anything. The timeline moves but not data is collected ...

Answer 1

Try this Link

In the WPFPerf Performance Profiling Tools for WPF 4 is now available! post, I mentioned that a bug caused the Visual Profiler to not display any data in certain time zones.
A patch is now available to fix this issue...

Answer 2

First check to see if its working even with a small blank WPF application. If it is not working with a blank WPF app, then it likely is the patch already mentioned (TimeZone patch to WPF Performance Profiling Tools for WPF 4 is now available).

However, in my case that wasn't the issue. Visual Profiler has a bug that causes it not to display the Element tree if it doesn't like some of the characters in its main window title bar.

Through hours of trial and error, I was able to trace the root cause of why it would not work on our application even though it would on a blank WPF application. The reason is that our application has a special character in the title bar text (trademark). If we eliminate the special character from the main window title, the element tree shows fine when the visual profiler is attached. I was able to reproduce this issue in the simple blank WPF application too simply by putting the following property on the main window:

<Window ..... Title="Test Application™" >

Looks like a bug in Visual Profiler that somehow is triggered by special characters. I didn't test for other special characters, but likely it isn't just this one.

So the workaround is to remove the special character while you are profiling until they fix this.