Timing code (poor-mans instrumentation)

Let’s say you want to time how long something takes to run. Well,  before .NET 2.0, maybe you capture the start time and end time – and then try to fumble through some way to calculate the elapsed time. Then in .NET 2.0 – maybe it got one step better because you could calculate a “TimeSpan” from the two times. Well, there is one step better – it’s System.Diagnostics.Stopwatch. For example:

 

Stopwatch currentStopwatch = new Stopwatch();

currentStopwatch.Start();

 

// execute some code

 

currentStopwatch.Stop();

MessageBox.Show(currentStopwatch.Elapsed.ToString());

 

That outputs a very high resolution output, for example:

 

00:00:00.0000117

 

In a pinch, if you don’t have a better way to instrument or profile code – this makes it a little easier.