Enabling Frame Rate Counters for XAML Applications in Windows 8

DebugSettings.EnableFrameRateCounter = true; in the App.xaml.cs App constructor will get you what you want.

The rest of this information is outdated!

 

Introduction

One of the things that we all look at before we ship software is the performance of our apps. Last November I posted a quick and easy way to do it in Silverlight. Today I am going to walk you through doing it in Windows 8 for your Metro XAML applications.

After the Build event was over I was interested in learning how to do this for my Windows 8 Metro Apps. I started watching videos from the Build RSS Feed and noticed this one from Tim Heuer that did just that.

Let’s get started

Click/Touch the “Developer Command Prompt” to begin. 

That will open a Developer Command Prompt. At the command prompt simply type in “regedit” without quotes as shown below.

Add the Registry Key

Now depending on the version of Windows 8 you have installed navigate and add the following key.

32-bit version of Windows 8

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Xaml]

"EnableFrameRateCounter"=dword:00000001

64-bit

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Xaml]

"EnableFrameRateCounter"=dword:00000001

In my case I was using Windows 8 64-bit. I had to create a new key called XAML and added a DWORD (32-bit) named EnableFrameRateCounter with a value of 1

Let’s test it

All you have to do now is to run any XAML / C# Metro Application.

Ok so what do these numbers mean? Again thanks to Tim Heuer for the nice slide.

You will notice that any application built using XAML / C# will display this framerate counter. Even the ones that ships with Windows 8. (For example: The Memories application)

What about HTML / JS apps?

It will not work with HTML / JS Metro Applications as I tried it. I think that is why the registry key starts with “XAML”. =)

Thanks for reading!