Through the development of ANTS Memory Profiler 5, we realised that the most serious barrier to customers wanting to buy memory profilers was how complex and hard-to-understand memory profiling is.

It happened that, for other reasons, I'd architected the memory profiler UI as a reusable component. Halfway though the project, I had the idea to use it to throw together a game-style tutorial mode for the memory profiler, to lead people though some common workflows in a mocked-up memory profiler UI.

Brian got wind of this, and showed me his article about how we should learn from video game designers, and lead people gradually though the new world of memory. Unfortuntately, I can't control the customer's own application to cause it to have simple kinds of memory leak to start with!

Still, I believe the principle that you learn best by doing, and I want to test it. So now the project is over, I have enough time to manually engineer some of these tutorials, and see if anyone finds them useful.



You can find them at the labs wiki. Give them a go, let me know what you think of the idea.