Thursday, February 16, 2006

Performance profiling rocks!

Performance profiling is sooo cool! I first encountered this concept in the early 80s, then it was a C-preprocessor that inserted calls to a statistics gathering function in all relevant places, and then you got a nice log file to analyze. Behind the scenes, not much has changed, but of course we have IDE-integration and all that.

AxCrypt2Go had a problem with displaying a list view taking significant time. With a profiler, it was an hours work to isolate the two major culprits and redesign the code to use those parts much less frequently. Without a profiler, it would have been pure guesswork, and possibly unsuccessful.

If you don't have a profiler for your favorite development environment, go get one now! Don't wait. Btw - I'm using Compuwares community edition, it's got some pretty nice features and like AxCrypt - it's free!
AxCrypt2Go is not exactly progressing at blinding speed, but that's simply due to having lots of other things taking time in life. Such as computers ;-) AxCrypt is becoming too successful, so I need to upgrade servers and software to handle the load of registrations and update notification e-mails which is taking some time from development unfortunately.

Still, it's now got most of the very basic functionality of windows and navigation, right-click interface and AxCrypt-compatible encryption and decryption. Just a few more clean-ups and disabling of some non-functioning options, and it's time for an alpha to get some feed back on the basic interface idea (it's a Windows Explorer-like window with a tree view for navigation and a list view for actions using the right-click as usual).

If you're reading this, and would like to be notified of the alpha, drop me a mail!