I was playing around with some Silverlight profiling the other night to see if I could find any obvious issues with my open source project StatLight and wound up writing a little script in PowerShell I hoped someone might find helpful.

But I didn’t know you could profile a Silverlight app.

I didn’t until I started doing some digging online. Now, the Silverlight profiling story (at least from what I’ve seen/tried) is not near the easy of say Redgate ANTS Performance Profiler. However, it’s do-able. (And with this helper script – hopefully a little simpler?)

How can I profile a Silverlight Application?

I would recommend you read the following blog, which explains one way of doing it very well.

http://blogs.msdn.com/profiler/archive/2010/04/26/vs2010-silverlight-4-profiling.aspx

So… what’s this script for?

If you read the blog above, or have done this before, then you probably noticed that there was quite a series of commands you had to execute before you could wind up with a performance report.

I threw together a quick little PowerShell script in an attempt to automate smooth out the process.

Hot do I use it?

1. Download the script & save it somewhere. http://github.com/staxmanade/Scripts/blob/master/SilverlightProfiler.ps1
2. Open the PowerShell console. cd to the directory your xap/assemblies are stored.
   (EX: {myProject}\Bin\Debug\ )
3. Execute:
   {pathToScript}\SilverlightProfiler.ps1 -urlPath "{myProject}\Bin\Debug\TestPage.html"
4. When your done profiling press enter to signal that your done.
   Once complete, it will print the location your profiling report was saved. You can then open it with Visual Studio.

Couple of disclaimers.

• Some paths are hard-coded to my x86 machine.
• I had troubles running the built in visual studio .bat files (from powershell) that are supposed to set the environment variables. So I extracted out what vars I could find to make it work.
• I’m not a profiling expert – just hacked this together to get it to work for me.

I hope this is useful, and if you know of a better way, I’m always interested in hearing your feedback.