Book Image

Windows Application Development Cookbook

By : Marcin Jamro
Book Image

Windows Application Development Cookbook

By: Marcin Jamro

Overview of this book

Need to ensure you can always create the best Windows apps regardless of platform? What you need are solutions to the biggest issues you can face, so you can always ensure you’re making the right choices and creating the best apps you can. The book starts with recipes that will help you set up the integrated development environment before you go ahead and design the user interface. You will learn how to use the MVVM design pattern together with data binding, as well as how to work with data in different file formats. Moving on, you will explore techniques to add animations and graphics to your application, and enable your solution to work with multimedia content. You will also see how to use sensors, such as an accelerometer and a compass, as well as obtain the current GPS location. You will make your application ready to work with Internet-based scenarios, such as composing e-mails or downloading files, before finally testing the project and submitting it to the Windows Store. By the end of the book, you will have a market-ready application compatible across different Windows devices, including smartphones, tablets, and desktops.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Windows Application Development Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgements
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Monitoring the CPU and memory usage


Applications, even for smartphones, can perform operations that intensively use resources. For this reason, it is possible that an application behaves differentially on various devices. This could lead to some problems with the operation, such as a poor user experience. With the usage of Microsoft Visual Studio Community 2015, a developer could measure CPU and memory usage in real time while running the application. In this recipe, you will learn how to use such a mechanism in your projects.

Getting ready

To complete this recipe, you need an automatically generated project.

How to do it...

To monitor the CPU and memory usage while debugging the application, you need to perform the following steps:

  1. Start debugging the application.

  2. Open the Diagnostic Tools window by navigating to Debug | Show Diagnostic Tools from the menu.

  3. Observe the process memory and CPU usage in charts, shown as follows:

How it works...

The Diagnostic Tools window presents a set of useful information, not only about the used MB of the memory and percentage of CPU used. It also informs about moments when Garbage Collector (GC) is launched. What is more, you can see some steps of debugging, such as hitting a breakpoint.

It is really important to check the execution of the application on the slowest supported device to ensure that it will not have any problems with performance. Reaching the maximum acceptable values of CPU or memory usage is a sign that the code needs to be optimized. By modifying the code and checking its performance in an iterative way, you will see the impact of your changes on the final result.