Troubleshooting startup performance issues for Visual Studio.

This is a very good blog post about troubleshooting startup performance issues for Visual Studio:

http://startbigthinksmall.wordpress.com/2011/11/08/activity-log-profiler-find-out-which-extension-is-slowing-down-your-visual-studio/

In summary, start VS with the /log flag:

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 11.0\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe" /log

(11.0 is for VS 2012, will need to be different for other versions of course).

Also download this xsl file:

https://github.com/lcorneliussen/ActivityLogProfiler/raw/master/ActivityLogProfiler.xsl 

and place it into folder:

%AppData%\Roaming\Microsoft\VisualStudio\xx.x (version number) 

Then delete the original xsl file ActivityLog.xsl, and make a copy of the downloaded xsl file, then rename that copy as the original (ActivityLog.xsl). We want to keep a copy of the downloaded one, because each VS startup overwrites the .xsl....

Then open the ActivityLog.xml file with internet explorer and examine the startup information.

code snippets online

http://codesnippet.research.microsoft.com/

duplicate code detection

This seems like a stable project in working condition, it is worth a test. http://sourceforge.net/projects/pmd/

Another one that produces fancy graphs, but probably requires more reading of the documentation in order to actually understand what the output means http://www.ccfinder.net/ccfinderxos.html

Also interesting tool to try is the successor to Microsoft Labs PEX, Microsoft CodeDigger

Microsoft CHESS tool for concurrency testing