Both release candidates are now available, both work with CLR 4.0, and we've got a funky new YouTube channel containing tutorial videos for both. Check it out...

Release candidates for both ANTS Memory Profiler 5 and ANTS Performance Profiler 5 are now available via:

http://www.red-gate.com/MessageBoard/viewforum.php?f=92

We'd also like to announce our great new YouTube channel, which contains tutorial videos for both. You can access this at:

http://www.youtube.com/user/redgatedotnetteam

Possibly the most exciting news for the RCs, is that both profilers now have some support for CLR 4.0 Beta, although this isn't "official", and side-by-side mode certainly doesn't work. Our priority for these releases has been to provide rock solid support for .NET 2.0, 3.0, 3.5 (and 1.1, with some limitations), so to this end we've fixed a few rare but annoying edge case crashes affecting these platforms. That said, if you do need to profile an application running on CLR 4.0 Beta, this could be your lucky day, so I'd strongly suggest you'd give it a go-it should just work; no need to set any special switches, or tinker around with the registry or anything... on the other hand we haven't exactly gone to town on CLR 4.0 testing, so if you do run into problems please let us know-this is why it isn't officially supported, and isn't likely to be until some time after the 5.0 releases go out.

Support for the Windows 7 release candidate, which we know a lot of you are now targeting, has also been improved. As far as we know, there are no Windows 7 specific problems, but if you do run into anything, again, please let us know, and we'll do our best to help you, and/or get a fix in for the final release.

Regarding .NET 2.0 Service Pack 1, we've decided not to require this for either profiler, however if you're using ANTS Memory Profiler 5 with ASP.NET applications on Web Development Server (Cassini) you will need to install SP1 to avoid instability and hangs whilst taking snapshots. In general we would also recommend the installation of SP1 for other scenarios because, although in virtually all cases you should find that both profilers will work fine without it, you may, in rare cases, observe some instability in the application being profiled or, even more rarely, the the profiler itself. We do understand that sometimes, particularly if you're consulting, you don't have the luxury of that much control over your development system, which is why we haven't mandated SP1.

If you want screenshots of the new memory profiler, you can find plenty in my previous post, announcing the beta releases (not much has changed since then):

http://www.simple-talk.com/community/blogs/bart/archive/2009/05/15/73430.aspx

The performance profiler UI has undergone very few changes from version 4-most of the additions are behind the scenes-but, if you're not familiar with it, take a look here for some great shots, along with a bit of history:

http://www.simple-talk.com/community/blogs/bart/archive/2008/09/02/69343.aspx

If all goes to plan we should have the final release out within the next two to three weeks.