2009 was a busy year for us: yet another complete rewrite with ANTS Memory Profiler 5, a new profiling mode in ANTS Performance Profiler 5, the {smartassembly} acquisition, most of the work done for .NET Reflector 6 and .NET Reflector Pro, which allows you to debug into third party code just as if it were your own - we're now into heavy pre-release bug-fixing - and starting work on ANTS Performance Profiler 6, including a brand new, and very fast, sampling mode. On top of this we released a new version of Exception Hunter, including a brand new source code view showing exactly where exceptions are thrown, and an option to only include documented exceptions. We also kicked out several patch releases of the performance profiler which we used to make significant improvements to IIS and ASP.NET profiling support - our next big focus related to this is Sharepoint, so look for this in ANTS Performance Profiler 6.

Both .NET Reflector 6/.NET Reflector Pro, and ANTS Performance Profiler 6 are already available to try in the form of early access builds. If you haven't taken the time to look at them yet I'd highly recommend you do so. You can get them from:

http://bit.ly/5UveA7

and

http://bit.ly/8G5FYQ

respectively.

.NET Reflector will be released late in February, with ANTS Performance Profiler 6 following later in the year. We want to include .NET 4.0 and Silverlight 4 support with ANTS Performance Profiler 6, so we're rather tied to Microsoft's release schedule unfortunately. One of the other great things about this release is that we'll finally offer support for attaching the profiler to a running process in sampling mode, which is often a must for profiling production systems, and is something a lot of you have been rightly clamouring for.

Going back to .NET Reflector 6, we intend to continue supporting the Mono runtime, however we've run into "a bit of a glitch", which has temporarily derailed our plans. I won't go into details here, because I've talked about this on the Mono forums at http://bit.ly/7sbB77, but the short version is that until we've fixed this problem with v6 we will continue to provide 5.1.x builds that run on Mono. It's all a bit of a pain, but not the end of the world. In the meantime, let me apologise for any hassle it might cause you.

In addition, we're starting work on a new major release of {smartassembly} which will pull the product more in line with the rest of our product range, allow us to fix a raft of problems reported by customers, and include support for the final release of .NET 4.0. As with our other tools we'll be conducting remote usability trials of new builds so, if you're interested, please drop an email to usability@red-gate.com.

ANTS Memory Profiler 5 has gone down a storm, and we're already looking at how we can improve the tool further to make it even easier to track down memory problems in .NET code. Please keep the feedback coming - we really do need it to make our tools solve the problems that you encounter on a day to day basis. Please post any comments you have on the forum at http://bit.ly/8hOjyT.

I said at the beginning that 2009 was busy, but I think 2010 will be busier, with major releases of .NET Reflector, {smartassembly}, and ANTS Performance Profiler on the cards just within the first few months of the year.

Finally, and on a slightly tangential note, Red Gate is currently hiring: if you're a talented software developer looking for a new job and you'd like to work for an exciting company developing cool software then we're looking for you. Take a look here to find out more: http://bit.ly/5SL6g7.

Happy New Year!