ANTS Profiler 3 vs. Visual Studio 2005

tableau

Could someone from Red-Gate please provide something that compares ANTS Profiler to the built-in performance tools in Visual Studio 2005? Are they intended to be complimentary tools or at they essentially doing the same types of things?

Brian Donahue

Microsoft Visual Studio 'Team System' comes with a code profiler, which performs similarly to ANTS Profiler.

Red Gate typically don't pursue a 'feature matrix' for any competitors products, as far as I know. It wouldn't be a bad idea, though!

tableau

I think it's almost essential if Red Gate wants to sell the software, at least to large companies that have IT cost control measures in place.

I'm asking for this info because my company is balking at buying any more ANTS licenses until I provide some sort of product comparison between ANTS and the VS performance tools.

AdamMil

ANTS is much cheaper. (Although the gap is lessened with the Pro version.)

richardjm

AdamMil wrote:

ANTS is much cheaper. (Although the gap is lessened with the Pro version.)

Having another think and not having looked into the profiler from Microsoft at all just thinking of a few things ours does.

Performance or Memory profile .NET 1.1, 2.0, 3.0
Method level timing and line-by-line timing
Results can be shared between people who don't have licenses (one person has a license for ANTS Profiler and creates the results, other users can then view the results without needing a license of ANTS Profiler)
Profile ASP.NET, webdev, .NET applications, COM+ .NET components, .NET Windows service, .NET 3 XBAP
You can easily and cheaply buy support, email, phone and forum support.

That should do

Out of interest I don't tend to look at competitors products very much. I think it sometimes can skew your development towards copying rather than innovating and as a programmer I much prefer to innovate.

Hope this helps somewhat.

Richard

tableau

Thanks for the response.

Regarding ANTS being cheaper -- that is true if you don't already have VS 2005, in which case ANTS is an extra cost. That's the situation I'm in as my company has thousands of VS 2005 licenses and is now considering ANTS as an uncessary purchase.

Brian Donahue

Hello,

I believe you mean 'Team System' for developers. This is far more expensive than just buying Visual Studio on its' own. Maybe you just want VS2005 without all of the extra stuff and just want a profiler to go with that. Or you have VS 2005 Express (of course the ANTS Profiler add-in can't be used in Express, but you can still use it externally to VS2005 Express).