Profiling Microsoft Office managed-code add-ins

Category: How do I?
Date: 17 Jun 2009
Product: ANTS Memory Profiler
Versions: 3,4

How can managed-code add-ins for Microsoft Office be profiled for performance or memory use?

ANTS Profiler can profile an add-in produced for any Microsoft Office application using Visual Studio .NET. Add-ins are typically implemented as a dll assembly loaded into the relevant Office application's process. Therefore, you would profile the application that loads your dll in order to get the performance and memory usage data for it from ANTS Profiler.

For instance, to profile the performance of an add-in for Microsoft Excel, you would:

  - Start ANTS Profiler and choose either Performance or Memory profiling (version 3)
  - Choose .NET Desktop Application
  - Browse for and select Excel.exe (c:\program files\Microsoft Office\OFFICE12\Excel.exe)
  - Choose to profile Only .NET methods that have source code if your assembly has a corresponding PDB file, or choose another option
  - Click OK on the warning about the process being profiled containing unmanaged code (It's not going to prevent profiling)
  - Excel will start; perform whatever actions are necessary to invoke methods in your add-in
  - Take snapshots (memory profiler) or close Excel to gather performance profiling results

The results should reflect the managed code performance of your add-in's .NET code.

Document ID: KB200801000224 Keywords: ANTS, Profiler,Office,add-in,Excel,Outlook,Word

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