Today,the team released Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 AJAX ProfilingExtensions - a new power tool to measure the performance of theportions of web applications that execute JavaScript inside the webbrowser.

TheAJAX Profiling Extensions provide much-needed visibility into oftencomplex, web client-side interactions for the first time.  Youdo not need to download and install any additional software, plug-ins,or ActiveX controls on the machine where the AJAX web client code isrunning to use the AJAX Profiling Extensions to gather JavaScriptexecution-time data.  Also, this works with any web browser, including, of course, the latest version of Internet Explorer.

AJAXProfiling Extensions is an add-on to the performance tools that areavailable in Visual Studio Team System 2008 Development Edition andVisual Studio Team Suite, extending them to allow you to profile theclient-side JavaScript code in your AJAX application.

Developedin collaboration with Microsoft Research, AJAX Profiling Extensionsautomatically rewrites JavaScript functions to enable instrumentationthat measures and logs each function’s performance data. Thisperformance data is then periodically uploaded from the client browserto the IIS web server, where it is collected and available for analysis.

How it Works

AJAX Profiling Extensions consist of two major pieces:

1.     a server-side component that handles JavaScript instrumentation and data collection

2.     a Visual Studio Team System add-in that reads and analyzes the performance data gathered into the Visual Studio Performance Explorer.

Theserver-side component installs into the IIS 7.0 integrated pipeline and adds instrumentation to your JavaScript code on the fly before it issent to the web browser. The AJAX Profiling Extensions are designed towork with any web browser, but they require IIS 7.0 running inIntegrated Pipeline mode. A Profiling Extensions Administration panelon the web server allows you to define and manage profiling sessions.

Once you have gathered AJAX client performance data, you can install AJAXProfiling Extensions onto your copy of Visual Studio 2008 TeamDevelopment Edition or Visual Studio Team Suite. You can then use theVisual Studio Profiler to analyze the performance data gathered fromyour client-side JavaScript applications. The Visual Studio Profilerwill provide data such as which JavaScript functions your applicationis calling most frequently and which ones take the longest amount timeto process.  As you are analyzing the data, you can navigate directly to JavaScript source.

To get started monitoring the performance of your client-side AJAX code, download Visual Studio 2008 AJAX Profiling Extensions from Code Gallery, then join the discussion.