Development and Debugging Tools for Windows Phone 7 Series

Cullen WatersSoftware Development Engineer II

Advanced Technology Group, Microsoft Corporation

Who Should Stay for This Talk?

Game Developersworking on other mobile platforms

interested in branching out to mobileFolks who have not used XNA professionally

Who Might Want to Leave?

who have shipped an XNA XBLA title

People who are uninterested in Windows Phone 7 Series development

Game Developers

Overview

Toolset

Silverlight 3 (plus)

XNA

Visual Studio 2010

Visual Phone Developer Express

Single, integrated download

Silverlight 3 (Plus)

Silverlight 3 with some device-specific additionsAccelerometerTouchLocation

XNA Framework 4.0

A new version of XNAFull 3D support on the deviceAPIs similar to those we know and love from Windows and Xbox 360

Visual Studio 2010

Full debugging support on the device Lots of new goodness in

Visual Studio 2010

Visual Studio & .NET

Productive development with .NET & C# High performance IDE Intellisense makes coding faster Integrated build/deploy/debug experience MSBuild engine for build automation

Visual Phone Developer Express

New Express SKU for Visual Studio 2010

Supports Silverlight and XNA development

Full device debugging support

Windows Phone 7 Series Emulator

Supports full application development

Reduces costs of test and development

Emulator, not a simulator

XNA Project System

C# is the only language for XNA development for Windows Phone 7 Series

All code files are organized into .csproj project files

.csproj is an MSBuild-based project system

XNA Content PipelineSimplify Your Content Usage!

Provides build-time modification of source content

Customizable, extensible

Runs only on Windows

Full .NET supportp/invokeManaged C++, VB.Net, IronPython, and so on

Content Pipeline Project Changes

Makes for easier parallel development of art and code

Content pipeline is extremely extensible, so integration with existing tools is possible

Content projects no longer appear as child projects of the game project

.NET ToolsThere are lots of great tools out there, both free and commercialThese are my “must-have” tools

Explore, browse, and analyze .NET assemblies

Understand relationships between classes

Verify code obfuscation

.NET Reflector

MSIL disassemblerUseful for seeing what code is being generated at build time

ildasm

Also known as F1 profiler Performs code performance profiling,

using sampling or instrumentation

Visual Studio Team System Profiler

Sampling vs. Instrumentation

Sampling takes samples at regular intervals Generally better for initial investigation

Instrumentation inserts probes into the code Use for more targeted profiling

Profiles managed memory usage Invaluable for debugging game memory management

CLR Profiler

Pix for Windows

Graphics debugger

GPU performance investigation

Semi-transparent view into DirectX 3D

Shader debugging

Ships with DX SDK

FxCop

Static code analysis tool

Integrated into Visual Studio

Analyzes compiled code

Not all rules will likely apply to games

Code Obfuscation

All un-obfuscated code is open source Dotfuscator Community Edition

bundled with Visual Studio

DemoObfuscation

Wait a Minute!

Most of those tools are Windows tools I’m developing a game for Windows Phone 7

Series! How do those tools apply to development for

Windows Phone 7 Series?

Debugging NetCF Titles

Cross-Platform Solution

Develop onWindows

Profile onWindows

Deploy toDevice

Getting Info from the Device

Roll your own on-device tools Visual information, from the game Check out Ito’s debugging toolset

Timing on the Phone

No high-precision timer ≈ 1 ms resolution How do you get accurate timings from that?

Capture multiple frames of data and calculate an average

Multiple 0 or 1 values, averaged over a bunch of frames, gives you a pretty accurate result

FPS component from Shawn Hargreaves

Case StudyHeightmap Collision Sample

Build and Run on Windows

Frame rate is good Iteration time is wonderful Life is good, ship it™!

But Then We Run on a NetCF Device

Frame rate is poor Gameplay is affected by unpredictable stalls What’s going on? Most likely cause: Garbage collections

Sidebar: NetCF Garbage Collector

Mark and Sweep Not generational Halts all managed threads on the device

We’re Allocating During Gameplay?!?

Let’s figure out where Run the game on PC, under CLR Profiler

DemoCLR Profiler

Kill the Collector!

Remove allocations during gameplay Pre-allocate Be careful of hidden allocators

How could this be easier? Run it again on the device,

and we get constant frame rate

Constant FPS != Good FPS

Constant + Low == still bad Fire up the VSTS profiler, and figure out

where we’re spending our time

DemoVSTS Profiler

Sidebar: NetCF Jitter

Non-optimizing jitter Primarily designed for application development

Apps bound by I/O, not by CPU/GPU High latency toleration

No inlining

There’s the Culprit!

Make changes to fix the code Run on the device again FPS is good, ship it™!

Summary

Wrapping It Up

Use Windows to your advantage Keep your game running on the target platform Design with the target platform in mind

Additional Resources

http://MicrosoftGamefest.com http://blogs.msdn.com/ShawnHar http://creators.xna.com http://www.red-gate.com CLR Profiler download page Ito's debugging tools

Questions?

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