Multithreaded Profiling.net Application (Visual Studio 2008)

Question

I recently installed (eval of) Visual Studio 2008 TS to be able to profile the application I made. Now I just find out how little I know about profiling (the real world) when applications are more complicated than Hello World.

My main problem is that the integrated debugger seems to add time spent on all threads, so I get the total runtime several times, and some functions (like sleep) appear several times, I guess, since they are called several streams.

Now my problem is: how can I make it easier to learn? I'm only interested in one thread (the main one, which does all the work), others just wait for certain things and are completely limited by the operating time of my main thread. (They are in the same modules, although they sometimes call the same functions.)

Is there a way to set up profiling? Any way to process the results to make them more meaningful to my scenario? Any other solution than VS 2008 (e.g. 2010 or an external profiler)?

I am using tools right now (gave me better results than sampling in my opinion) with C # under .net 3.5.

Answer 1

Red Gate's ANTI Performance Profiler can filter flow profiling results.

The documentation on working with the call tree (in particular, the section "Changing the settings for displaying the call tree") shows a screenshot where you can access the filter.