Nik from the dotnet team shares practical .NET performance profiling strategies in Visual Studio, including benchmarking and using GitHub Copilot, aimed at developers seeking to optimize and improve application performance.

Real-World .NET Profiling with Visual Studio

Presented by Nik

Session Overview

In this session, Nik takes participants beyond the basics of performance profiling by demonstrating real-world workflows for optimizing open source .NET libraries. The focus is on actionable profiling techniques and tools to improve application performance.

Key Topics Covered

• Visual Studio Profiler: Running CPU and .NET Allocation traces to identify bottlenecks and memory issues.
• BenchmarkDotNet: Incorporating this tool for structured benchmarking to assess and compare code performance changes.
• GitHub Copilot: Using AI-assisted code suggestions to refactor and optimize code for better performance.
• Workflow Integration: Combining profiler insights with benchmarking and Copilot-generated improvements.

Practical Techniques

• Setting up and interpreting performance traces in Visual Studio.
• Using profiler data to target and optimize slow or inefficient code paths.
• Writing and executing benchmarks with BenchmarkDotNet.
• Leveraging GitHub Copilot to generate code suggestions and quickly experiment with optimizations.

Who Should Watch

• Developers contributing to open source .NET projects.
• Engineers looking to sharpen their profiling and optimization skills.
• Anyone building high-performance applications using .NET, C#, or related Microsoft technologies.

Additional Resources

• .NET 10
• .NET Aspire 13
• ASP.NET Core 10
• .NET MAUI 10
• C# 14
• F# 10
• Visual Studio 2026
• Microsoft Learn for .NET

Connect with .NET Community

• Blog
• Docs
• Forums

Q&A

For further questions, visit the Q&A page.