perform profiling on windows ce

Profiling is an effective way of finding out bottlenecks in an application. On windows ce platform, profiling can also be done easily.

To perform profiling for native code, we can use the /callcap compiler option to enable callcap profiling. After it's enabled, the compiler will inject method invocation to _CAP_Enter_Function and _CAP_Exit_Function upon entering and returnning from a function respectively. We can print or log current time in these method to achieve profiling.
It's notable that while compiling the source file contains _CAP_Enter_Function and _CAP_Exit_Function's definition, we must disable /callcap option, otherwise, these function will call themself recursively. In most cases, it's a wise idea to create a library project to implement these profiling hook fuction and trun /callcap off for the project. Then link the library to other applications to be profiled.
For demonstration, here is a visual studio project shows how to do profiling:
http://code.google.com/p/rxwen-blog-stuff/source/browse/trunk/wince/ce_profiling/

After we run the application, we get below output:

Enter function (at address 00011068) at 73875892
Enter function (at address 00011030) at 73875897
Enter function (at address 00011000) at 73875902
bar
Leaving function (at address 00011000) at 73876907
foo
Leaving function (at address 00011030) at 73879912
Leaving function (at address 00011068) at 73879916

 
As you can see, it's a very rough sample that only prints the address of function being called. Not convenient to analyse. We may improve it by mapping and translating the address to function name, because we, as the application developer, possess the private symbol file. This task doesn't need to be done on the windows ce box, it's much easier to save the log file then parse and analyse it on a pc.

References:
Remote call profiler
A tour of windows ce performance tools