I've been searching for the right tool that enables energy efficient application development.  Finally, the Microsoft Visual Studio team has the feature in their 2008 release coming out soon.  Send this post on to your dev teams and architects to develop energy efficient applications.

The first feature that I want to cover is the new comparison document that we’ve introduced to help users compare profiling data from two different profiling runs. Say that you have just checked in a possible fix for a performance issue and you want to compare a new performance report to one that existed before the change to see if your change really helped. Our new comparison features make these types of questions easy to answer. Comparing two files of performance data is a very common scenario for customers, especially when dealing with regression testing, so this was a priority feature for us in this release. After all, performance data when taken in isolation, without goals to hit or old values to compare with, can be pretty hard to work with. Our goal with this new comparison work is to help customers to make better use of their performance data to achieve the performance results that they desire for their applications.

I would be remiss if I did not take a quick second here to dive a little deeper into the importance of setting performance goals for your applications. Too often developers end up in the situation of closing in on product release and realizing “my app is just way too slow.” Now, it is perfectly understandable that developers want to save performance optimization for the end of the product cycle; after all if the underlying structure is going to change greatly why waste too much time early on trying to tweak things to run as fast as possible? But the real issue with the situation above is in the generalness of the “my app is just way too slow” part. What exactly do you mean by “too slow?” What parts of the app are too slow? What type of performance do customers expect from your app? How long does it take for other similar products to do the same task? For our new comparison features to be really useful you will need to take some time before and during development to get at least basic answers to some of the questions above.

And, they've also integrated collecting perfmon data for

With the Visual Studio Profiler we wanted to give customers an easy and integrated way to collect this performance counter information and view it alongside their performance data. This was especially important to us as with this information we could help customers to analyze specific trouble areas of their program or to choose the correct profiling modes based on their performance bottleneck.