In my company we have a very complex Silverlight application. This application is highly dynamic and fully asynchronous. Lately we encountered some performance problems on slower PCs. Unfortunately there doesn’t yet exist any decent profiler for Silverlight applications. Since - as I already mentioned - our application is rather complex it is difficult to impossible to analyze this application thoroughly without a good profiling tool. We have tried various ways to track down the problems by e.g. manually adding trace code or by writing profiling interceptors for all our classes that are registered in the IoC container. With this methods we were able to track some hotspots but these were only the tips of an iceberg.
While discussing with a coworker who showed me what he is doing with the aid of the Mono Cecil library I suddenly realized: “I can write my own profiler!”.
This is my first project using the Mono Cecil library. In this project we only need the Mono.Cecil.dll assembly.
Please note that the techniques presented here can be used for any type of assembly and are not restricted to Silverlight assemblies.
