Monthly Archives: May 2018

View Evaluation Profiles in Project System Tools

We pushed out a small update to Project System Tools last week that adds the ability to view evaluation profiles that are stored in a binlog file. Unfortunately, at the moment we can’t collect evaluation profiles within Visual Studio due to the lack of an API to turn it on (working on that RSN), so you have to use the command-line MSBuild to gather that information using the /profileevaluation switch.

I’ll try to write up a little more later about how to use evaluation profiles to find problems in your project. We’ve already used it to find several cases where globbing (i.e. wildcards) in a project caused repeated wildcard expansion that bottlenecked project load. So it can be very useful.

(We also added to the properties of targets in the viewer a Reason property that will tell you whether a target was run because of a BeforeTargets, AfterTargets, or DependsOn.)

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