Performance Troubleshooting (ANTS tool)

it happened once that a client raise an issue regarding to poor performance at certain area on an application that I was working on. That area was working perfectly on my environment, but at their environment it was not like that. I could not duplicate their environment locally because of security restrictions rules we have. Tracing code and do debugging was not helpful. Thus I decided to look into a tool that will help me on this mission.

I found a very nice tool that help me very much on tracing and figuring out the bottleneck on my application, that tool is called ANTS from Red-Gate. I strongly recommend to try this tool.

The good thing about this tool is that it is integrated inside the visual studio which making your life much easier when you want to start troubleshoot the performance issue. another thing that making it great is when you launch it from the visual studio, the result will be some sort of tree diagram for your code according to the resources utilization. Part of that diagram is the ability to see the code snap that you concerning about. also part of this output is an attribute that is showing you how many a certain method got called, you will find this very helpful because it will make you pay attention to methods that is getting called more than the expected numbers.

Red Gate providing this tool as a free trial to let you try it and make sure it is fitting to your business. you can check more about it by clicking here

Autocomplete (IntelliSense) While Writing SQL Statements; How Nice is SQL Prompt

As a .Net developer who using Visual Studio from early morning till late evening, I like the way MS designed the IntelliSense feature there. and I was so disappointed because there is no such a feature while you are using SQL Server Management Studio.

In version 2008 of SQL server Management Studio, MS solved the IntelliSense issue there but that was specifically if you are connecting to SQL Server 2008 backend engine.But I still need to use this feature while I am using SQL server 2000 and 2005 SQL server engines.

I found a very good software from Red-Gate called SQL Prompt, this software is doing a very nice job for me and solved all of my issues related to IntelliSense.

I have been using this software for 3 years till the moment I am writing this article, and I am still believe on it and if I start writing SQL statement without using it, I feel my life like a hell.

For me the IntelliSense feature of  SQL Prompt is much better than the one that MS developed on SQL server 2008. and Red-Gate is keeping enhancing it and making it much better everyday.

Code snap it on SQL prompt is amazing and saving my time a lot. You can define a keyword and its related SQL statements, once you type this keyword and then tab out, SQL Prompt will place the related SQL statements for you. For example, if you type “ssf” and tab out, SQL prompt will replace it by “SELECT * FROM “

As a conclusion, I would strongly recommend to you to use it during your daily development day.