Exactly 4 years after the 1.0 release of Uber Prof, we have the 2.0 release for Uber Prof.
You can find it here: http://hibernatingrhinos.com/products/
New features include production and cloud profiling, performance improvement and better error detection & guidance.
Well, as the year draws to a close, it is that time again, I got older, apparently. Yesterday marked my 31th trip around the sun.
To celebrate, I decided to give the first 31 people a 31% discount for all of our products.
This offer applies to:
This also applies to our support & consulting services.
All you have to do is to use the following coupon code: goodbye-2012
Enjoy the end of the year, and happy holidays.
With Uber Prof 2.0 (NHibernate Profiler, Entity Framework Profiler, Linq to SQL Profiler, LLBLGen Profiler) we are going to bring you a new era of goodness.
In 1.0, we gave you a LOT of goodness for the development stage of building your application, but now we are able to take it a few steps further. Uber Prof 2.0 supports production profiling, which means that you can run it in production and see what is going on in your application now!
To make things even more interesting, we have also done a lot of work to make sure that this works on the cloud as well. For example, go ahead and look at this site: http://efprof.cloudapp.net/
This is a live application, that doesn’t really do anything special, I’ll admit. But the kicker is when you go to this URL: http://efprof.cloudapp.net/profiler/profiler.html
This is EF Prof, running on the cloud, and giving you the results that you want, live. You can read all about this feature and how to enable it here, but I am sure that you can see the implications.
Well, we worked quite a bit on that, but the Uber Prof (NHibernate Profiler, Entity Framework Profiler, Linq to SQL Profiler, etc) version 2.0 are now out for public beta.
We made a lot of improvements. Including performance, stability and responsiveness, but probably the most important thing from the user perspective is that we now support running the profiler in production, and even on the cloud.
We will have the full listing of all the new goodies up on the company site soon, including detailed instructions on how to enable production profiling and on cloud profiling, but I just couldn’t wait to break the news to you.
In fact, along with V2.0 of the profilers, we have a brand new site for our company, which you can check here: http://hibernatingrhinos.com/.
To celebrate the fact that we are going on beta, we also offer a 20% discount for the duration of the beta.
Nitpicker corner, please remember that this is a beta, there are bound to be problems, and we will fix them as soon as we can.
Well, it took a while, but the next version of the NHibernate Profiler is ready to go to a private beta.
We go to private beta before the product is done, because we want to get as much early feedback as we can.
We have 10 spots for NHibernate Profiler v2.0 and 10 spots for Entity Framework Profiler v2.0.
If you are interested, please send me an email about this.
One of the things that I really love about build things like the profilers and RavenDB is that it gives me the chance to really spread a lot of my experience in codified form. Occasionally, we get customer feedback to that effect, and I thought that I would share this one with you.
Jeremy Holt have been using the Entity Framework Profiler and has the following to say:
The biggest issue it has highlighted for me is the question of the Context being created on different threads (the N+1 was easy to get my head around and resolve). The problem is the difficulty in finding definitive examples of how/when the Context should be created. (Also found my unbound queries – thanks for that!!)
It was working great (except for a couple of threading issues J) until I ran EFProf. I love the “page of shame” in EFProf – I think you called it “query analysis alerts” or something pompous like that – may I suggest you rename it to “errors dumb programmers make” J
I don’t think that this will be renamed, but this does point out something very important. What we are doing with the profilers is much more than simply show you what your application is doing. We are actually analyzing this data through a complex set of rules in order to find common pitfalls. In Jeremy’s case, the common ones were cross thread usage and Select N+1.
And by highlighting those issues, the profiler make it easy to do so. More so, it make you feel good about doing this, in a way that you wouldn’t get from standard analytics tools.
By having thresholds that you can visibly see and avoid, you get to create better software.
For an article I am writing, I wanted to compare a RavenDB model to a relational model, and I stumbled upon the following Northwind.NET project.
I plugged in the Entity Framework Profiler and set out to watch what was going on. To be truthful, I expected it to be bad, but I honestly did not expect what I got. Here is a question, how many queries does it take to render the following screen?
The answer, believe it or no, is 17:
You might have noticed that most of the queries look quite similar, and indeed, they are. We are talking about 16(!) identical queries:
SELECT [Extent1].[ID] AS [ID], [Extent1].[Name] AS [Name], [Extent1].[Description] AS [Description], [Extent1].[Picture] AS [Picture], [Extent1].[RowTimeStamp] AS [RowTimeStamp] FROM [dbo].[Category] AS [Extent1]
Looking at the stack trace for one of those queries led me to:
And to this piece of code:
You might note that dynamic is used there, for what reason, I cannot even guess. Just to check, I added a ToArray() to the result of GetEntitySet, and the number of queries dropped from 17 to 2, which is more reasonable. The problem was that we passed an IQueryable to the data binding engine, which ended up evaluating the query multiple times.
And EF Prof actually warns about that, too:
At any rate, I am afraid that this project suffer from similar issues all around, it is actually too bad to serve as the bad example that I intended it to be.
I don’t usually do posts about current events, but this one is huge.
To celebrate the event, you can use the following coupon code: SLT-45K2D4692G to get 19.41% discount (Gilad was captive for 1,941 days) for all our profilers:
Hell, even our commercial support for NHibernate is participating.
Please note that any political comment to this post that I don’t agree with will be deleted.
One of the things that you keep hearing about Microsoft products is how much time and effort is dedicated to ensuring Backward Compatibility. I have had a lot of arguments with Microsoft people about certain design decisions that they have made, and usually the argument ended up with “We have to do it this was to ensure Backward Compatibility”.
That sucked, but at least I could sleep soundly, knowing that if I had software running on version X of Microsoft, I could at least be pretty sure that it would work in X+1.
Until Entity Framework 4.1 Update 1 shipped, that is. Frans Bouma has done a great job in describing what the problem actually is, including going all the way and actually submitting a patch with the code required to fix this issue.
But basically, starting with Entity Framework 4.1 Update 1 (the issue also appears in Entity Framework 4.2 CTP, but I don’t care about this much now), you can’t use generic providers with Entity Framework. Just to explain, generic providers is pretty much the one way that you can integrate with Entity Framework if you want to write a profiler or a cacher or a… you get the point.
Looking at the code, it is pretty obvious that this is not intentional, but just someone deciding to implement a method without considering the full ramifications. When I found out about the bug, I tried figuring out a way to resolve it, but the only work around would require me to provide a different assembly for each provider that I wanted to support (and there are dozens that we support on EF 4.0 and EF 3.5 right now).
We have currently implemented a work around for SQL Server only, but if you want to use Entity Framework Profiler with Entity Framework 4.1 Update 1 and a database other than SQL Server, we would have to create a special build for your scenario, rather than have you use the generic provider method, which have worked so far.
Remember the beginning of this post? How I said that Backward Compatibility is something that Microsoft is taking so seriously?
Naturally I felt that this (a bug that impacts anyone who extends Entity Framework in such a drastic way) is an important issue to raise with Microsoft. So I contacted the team with my finding, and the response that I got was basically: Use the old version if you want this supported.
What I didn’t get was:
I find this unacceptable. The fact that there is a problem with a CTP is annoying, but not that important. The fact that a fully release package has this backward compatibility issue is horrible.
What makes it even worse is the fact that this is an update to a minor version, people excepts this to be a safe upgrade, not something that requires full testing. And anyone who is going to be running Update-Package in VS is going to hit this problem, and Update-Package is something that people do very often. And suddenly, Entity Framework Profiler can no longer work.
Considering the costs that the entire .NET community has to bear in order for Microsoft to preserve backward compatibility, I am deeply disappointed that when I actually need this backward compatibility.
This is from the same guys that refused (for five years!) to fix this bug:
new System.ComponentModel.Int32Converter().IsValid("yellow") == true
Because, and I quote:
We do not have the luxury of making that risky assumption that people will not be affected by the potential change. I know this can be frustrating for you as it is for us. Thanks for your understanding in this matter.
Let me put this to you in perspective, anyone who is using EF Prof is likely to (almost by chance) to get hit by that. When this happens, our only option is to tell them to switch back a version?
That makes us look very bad, regardless of what is the actual reason for that. That means that I am having to undermine my users' trust in my product. "He isn't supporting 4.1, and he might not support 4.2, so we probably can't buy his product, because we want to have the newest version".
This is very upsetting. Not so much about the actual bug, those happen, and I can easily imagine the guy writing the code making assumptions that turn out to be false. Heavens know that I have done the same many times before. I don’t even worry too much about this having escaped the famous Microsoft Testing Cycle.
What (to be frank) pisses me off is that the response that we got from Microsoft for this was that they aren’t going to fix this. That the only choice that I have it to tell people to downgrade if they want to use my product (with all the implications that has for my product).
We have been working on the profilers (NHibernate Profiler, Entity Framework Profiler, Linq to SQL Profiler, LLBLGen Profiler and Hibernate Profiler) for close to three years now. And we have been running always as 1.x, so we didn’t have a major release (although we have continual releases, we currently have close to 900 drops of the 1.x version).
The question now becomes, what is going to happen in the next version of the profiler?
Those are the big ones, we have a few others, and a surprise in store 
What would you want to see in the next version of the profiler?
There are posts all the way to Jun 09, 2025
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