Is there a CLR profiler that works with .NET 3.5 SP1 and WPF?

Question

In all of my searching, I've only been able to find this one link that suggests the old CLR Profiler for .NET 2.0 should work with .NET 3.0 or 3.5 applications.

When I try and profile my .NET 3.5 SP1 WPF application with the CLR Profiler for .NET 2.0 it starts up my application just fine, but it throws up a dialog that says "Waiting for application to start common language runtime".

Since my application clearly uses the CLR, I can only conclude that the CLR Profiler for .NET 2.0 does not work with newer versions of the framework (maybe it's just a problem with 3.5 SP1 apps).

So, does anyone know if there is a version of the CLR profiler that works with 3.5 SP1? If there isn't a version of Microsoft's profiler, is there another free profiler that I could use that has similar functionality?

Answer 1

I just tried running CLR Profiler with a WPF application, and it works fine. It takes a while for the application to start (longer than with non-WPF applications, it feels like), but it works.

Update: just to keep the answer up to date; according to the comments below, the solution was to run the CLR Profiler with administrative rights.

Answer 2

CLR Profiler 4 is released by microsoft on Jan 31, 2011.

This version supports .NET frameworks 2.0 to 4.0 as well as support for WPF and Silverlight.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=be2d842b-fdce-4600-8d32-a3cf74fda5e1

Note that it requires .NET framework 4.

Regards

Answer 3

The CLR used in 2.0 framework and 3.5 framework differs only by a service pack. The CLR has the version 2.0 and 2.0SP1 for the respective versions. The CLR profiler will work against the 2.0SP1 version of the CLR.

Small Correction: There is no 3.5 version of the CLR. The most recent versions are 2.0, 2.0SP1 and 2.0SP2 (associated with .Net Framework SP1).

Answer 4

I've just used the CLR profiler 2 with my .NET 4.0 WPF application. It could launch the App but when click on "Show Heap Now" or any items under "View" menu it showed report windows with empty figures. So I wonder if anyone already tried it successfully? Or it is just not supports for .NET WPF apps.

Answer 5

I made the mistake of running the x86 version of CLR Profiler for .NET Framework 2 on my 64-bit machine, which just showed the "Waiting for application to start common language runtime" message permanently. If you have a 64-bit machine, you probably have to run the version of CLR Profiler that matches the process you want to profile (i.e. normally the one in the "x64" folder)

For some reason WPF is extremely slow under the profiler.

Answer 6

Don't make the stupid mistake I did and try to use CLR profiler v1.1 – the correct one is CLR Profiler for .NET Framework 2.0 (even if you use .NET 3.5).