Platform Compliance Profiler - Overview

General Information

Controlling What to Profile

Limitation on Profiling of Visual Basic Applications

The Platform Compliance profiler helps you determine whether the profiled application is compatible with different operating systems. It analyzes calls to system libraries and checks which platform supports them and how. The analysis is done against a database which is part of the AQTime installation.

Profiler specifics:

• The Platform Compliance profiler is a static profiler. This means that it does not start the profiled application when you run the profiler, it analyzes its code.

• Unlike other profilers, it does not require that the application be compiled with debug information.

• The profiler analyzes unmanaged modules only.

• When checking calls to system functions, the profiler analyzes the table of imported functions of the profiled module(s). This table is created by the compiler, and it includes “statically-linked” libraries (that is, the libraries whose names are known during the compilation). The profiler neither tracks, nor analyzes calls to system libraries that are loaded dynamically (that is, during the application run).

Typically, the Platform Compliance profiler generates lots of results, because by default it analyzes all the calls to system libraries it can detect. To simplify the analysis of results, you can narrow down the profiling scope and focus on certain libraries only. To do this, you define profiling areas in your project. For complete information on using areas with the Platform Compliance profiler, see Excluding Unnecessary Functions From Analysis.

In Visual Basic, statically linked calls are calls defined through the DECLARE statement. If your VB application uses only the MSVBVM50 (Visual Basic 5.0) or MSVBVM60 (Visual Basic 6.0) libraries and uses no DECLARE of its own, the Platform Compliance profiler will yield no information at all in the Report panel.