Known Issues

DevPartner Performance Analysis Community Edition

Version 8.2.3

Copyright © 2009, Compuware Corporation. All rights reserved.


DevPartner Performance Analysis Community Edition provides a free, limited time (45 days) subset of the functions available in DevPartner Performance Analysis, a part of the DevPartner Studio suite of debugging tools.


Known Issues and Technical Notes

This section presents known issues and technical notes for DevPartner Performance Analysis Community Edition.

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Modifying DevPartner on Vista Systems

DevPartner's Modify option is not available through Control Panel > Add or Remove Programs on Vista systems. To modify a DevPartner installation on Vista systems, run DevPartner's installation program (setup.exe) and select the Modify option.

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Mach 5 Driver Not Starting on Vista

On Vista systems with UAC enabled, if you run Visual Studio 2005 without Administrative privileges, the Mach5 driver required for performance profiling is not started. Performance analysis will provide inaccurate data. To correct this condition, run Visual Studio 2005 as an administrator, as suggested by Microsoft, or manually start the Mach5 driver with the net start mach5 command.

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Installing Another Version of Visual Studio after DevPartner Performance Analysis Community Edition Installation

If you install Visual Studio 2005 after you install DevPartner Performance Analysis Community Edition, follow this two-step process to integrate the two products:

  1. Rerun the DevPartner Performance Analysis Community Edition installation, selecting Modify. (On Vista systems, you must run Modify from the installation media. DevPartner's Modify option is not available through Control Panel > Add or Remove Programs on Vista systems.)
  2. Run the DevPartner Performance Analysis Community Edition installation again, selecting Repair.

The second step is required to integrate the DevPartner help system with the Microsoft help system.

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Interoperability of DevPartner Studio Features and Products

Only one DevPartner product (such as DevPartner Fault Simulator or DevPartner SecurityChecker) can monitor a particular application process at any given time. For example, if DevPartner Fault Simulator is monitoring an executable file, you must wait for the fault simulation to end before starting a performance analysis session.

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Special Considerations for Instrumenting Code under Visual Studio 2005 on Multi-processor Machines

Although Visual Studio 2005 supports multiple concurrent builds, code marked for instrumentation is not being instrumented in some circumstances.

To work around this problem, configure the Maximum number of parallel project builds setting to 1 (via Tools > Options > Projects and Solutions > Build and Run in Visual Studio 2005).

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Packages Fail to Load or Installation Fails Due to Data Execution Prevention Setting

Systems with the Data Execution Prevention (DEP) setting configured as /NoExecute=Always On and the CPU's Execute Disable bit enabled might prevent DevPartner Performance Analysis Community Edition from loading into Visual Studio.

See article number 875352 in the Microsoft Knowledge Base for a detailed description of the Data Execution Prevention feature.

System-wide DEP is set in the BOOT.INI file using the /NOEXECUTE option on the system boot partition. By default this is set to OptIn, which specifies that DEP is only enabled for “essential” Windows programs and services.

Setting this to AlwaysOn causes the DevPartner Performance Analysis Community Edition installation to fail, and if the setting is changed to AlwaysOn after installation it will cause the DevPartner Performance Analysis Community Edition package to fail to load into Visual Studio.

If you set DEP to OptOut, be sure to include the Visual Studio executables (DEVENV.EXE for Visual Studio 2003 and 2005, MSDEV.EXE for Visual Studio 6) in the list of programs and services that are not to run with DEP.

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Reboot After Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 Installation

If you install Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1, you must reboot your machine after installing the service pack.

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Installing Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 on Windows Server 2003

If you are attempting to install Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 on Windows Server 2003, be aware of the issues described in Microsoft Knowledge Base article #925336.

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License Error After Uninstalling Fault Simulator

Installing Fault Simulator 1.5 after installing DevPartner Performance Analysis Community Edition, then uninstalling Fault Simulator, causes a licensing failure when attempting to run DevPartner Performance Analysis Community Edition.

To correct this problem, after uninstalling Fault Simulator:

  1. Reboot the machine.
  2. Do a Repair on DevPartner Performance Analysis Community Edition.
  3. Either reboot the machine or restart the NCS service.

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No Data for Certain Lines in Partial Classes in Visual Studio 2005

There is a known issue with displaying data collected for static initialization of member fields of partial classes in which a constructor is implemented in a different source file than the statically initialized fields. In these cases the source view will show no data for the static member field initialization. This is because the data is attributed to the constructor of the partial class and not the assignment statement for the static initialization of the field. If a source file only contains statically initialized member fields for a class, the source file will not be shown in the list of source files for the module in the results.

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CPU Time Charged to Wrong Line in For Loop

In some cases, CPU time attributable to the expression part of a For loop can be incorrectly attributed to the body of the For loop. This can occur in loops formatted so that the initializers, expression, and iterators appear on a single line, as in the example below.

			using System;
			public class ForLoopTest 
			{
			   public static void Main() 
			   {
			      for (int i=1; i<=5; i++) 
			          Console.WriteLine(i);
			   }
			}

If the body of the For loop appears to be consuming excessive CPU time, reformat your code so the initializers, expression, and iterators appear on separate lines, as shown below.

			{
			   for (int i=1;
			        i<=5; 
			        i++)
			        Console.WriteLine(i);
			}

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Analysis too Slow on Low-end System

If your performance analysis runs too slowly on a supported low-end PC (for example, a 733 MHz Pentium III), you can speed up sessions by changing the processor scheduling to provide equal processing priority for background services.

  1. Open System Properties: Click Start > Run and type sysdm.cpl and click OK.
  2. On the Advanced tab, under Performance, click Settings.
  3. On the Advanced tab of Performance Options, under Processor scheduling, select Background services and click OK.
  4. Click OK to exit System Properties.

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Internet Information Server Error During Analysis

When running an analysis session, Visual Studio may become unresponsive and then display the following error: 

Could not restart Internet Information Server (code %d). 

(In the message above, %d represents an internal error code. In the context of this issue, you can ignore this code.)

If this occurs several times, make sure that Internet Information Server is running. If it is not running, exclude system DLLs and try again.

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MSI.EXE Error During Install or Uninstall

During installation or removal of DevPartner Studio, an MSI.EXE error message might display stating that the application has encountered an error or has referenced memory it cannot read. Click Ok and ignore this error. The install/uninstall will continue without error.

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McAfee Anti-Virus Buffer Overrun Protection

Buffer overrun protection, a feature of many antivirus packages, can cause intermittent crashes when profiling Internet Explorer and IIS. Errors such as the following may occur:

"The application failed to initialize properly (0xc0000005) Click Ok to terminate."

If you have anti-virus installed and encounter these errors, turn off your anti-virus package's buffer overrun protection feature or contact your anti-virus vendor for updated software.

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Zero Impact Projects (ZIP) in Visual Studio 2005

In Visual Studio 2005, you can create a zero impact project (ZIP) by disabling the Save new projects when created option in the Tools > Options > Projects and Solutions > General options page. However, disabling this option prevents DevPartner from creating a virtual folder for the session file in Solution Explorer or storing the session results in that folder. For best results in collecting data from your project:

If you launch a session without saving the project, click Save when Visual Studio presents the message "The current project must be saved before adding a project". Visual Studio will rename the project and store it in Solution Explorer. Although the session file is created in this scenario, it will contain references to the temporary locations of the project source code and executable modules, as well as the temporary project name. We do not recommend running the DevPartner Performance Analysis Community Edition on Visual Studio 2005 "ZIP" projects.

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DevPartner Performance Analysis Community Edition Known Issues

Copyright © 2009, Compuware Corporation

06/08/2009 04:11 PM