User Interfaces are the core essence of any business application. Business application could be a desktop-based application, web-based, or a native application that runs on mobile. Measuring UI responsiveness is an essential practice in an enterprise world to make an application more responsive by emending UI-related issues and providing users a better experience. Desktop applications or native mobile applications have one UI thread that locks user access until the current request is processed. It could be a huge database call or any other backend processing like image or file that locks the UI thread. Thus, give bad experience to user.
To measure UI responsiveness, we can use the Concurrency Visualizer extension of Visual Studio that can be added in Visual Studio IDE from extensions and updates. This is not supported for web projects but provides tabular, graphical, and textual data to represent the relationship between your application threads and the system where application is running on.
The Concurrency Visualizer extension for Visual Studio can be installed from the Visual Studio market place (http://marketplace.visualstudio.com).
Once it runs, it starts analysing your system UI and provide detailed results like utilization, threads and cross-core thread migration, delays in synchronization, overlapped I/O operations, and much more. Here is the sample screenshot of the report it generates after running an analysis on a particular application:
