Visual Studio 2019 16.3 Preview Adds .NET Core Database Profiling -- Visual Studio Magazine

Visual Studio 2019 16.3 Preview Adds .NET Core Database Profiling

By David Ramel
09/17/2019

Microsoft yesterday shipped Visual Studio 2019 16.3 Preview 4, adding database profiling for projects based on .NET Core, which is coming out in a big v3.0 release next week.

After Microsoft had previously described the ninth .NET Core 3.0 preview as the final one, the new Visual Studio preview release actually caused the company to issue another surprise .NET Core 3.0 RC1 preview before next week's GA finale. That's because the .NET toolset -- including compilers, NuGet client, MSBuild and so on -- needs to be kept in sync across Visual Studio and the .NET Core SDK and the Core team apparently didn't account for another VS preview.

"We should have realized that there was a high likelihood that we might need to release changes to accommodate another Visual Studio preview," Microsoft said yesterday. "Making fixes in the .NET toolset like this is standard operating procedure. We could have released a new .NET Core SDK and only delivered it via Visual Studio, however, we've broken people in the (now distant) past with that approach. As a result, when we release a new .NET Core SDK, we make it available for everyone in all the places."

Now that everything is synced up again, Visual Studio 2019 16.3 Preview 4 fixes several developer community issues and adds some new functionality. Highlighting the latter is database profiling for .NET Core projects.

"This release includes a new tool in the suite of performance and diagnostics tools available via the Performance Profiler (ALT-F2)," the release notes say. "The new database tool will provide details about queries from .NET Core projects which utilize ADO.Net or Entity Framework. The tool provides a "go to source" option for linking to source code and provides timing details for each query executed during a profiling session. This tool can work simultaneously with other tools in the Performance Profiler. When used in conjunction with the CPU Usage tool, one gains detailed information about the performance characteristics of .Net Core code which uses a database."

Other newness consists of:

A new prompt to install Docker Desktop when adding Docker Support.
The capability to load symbols manually for Azure Watson and .NET Core remote debugging.

.NET Core 3.0 will be announced Sept. 23 during Microsoft's online .NET Conf.

About the Author

David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.

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