Profiling Windows Store Apps

Support for Windows Store Apps (sometimes called WinRT) was added via pre-instrumentation.

The features of pre-instrumentation are not limited to use for Windows Store apps, but are useful for any coverage collection where attaching the NCover coverage profiler at runtime is not possible or desirable.

Pre-instrumentation enables each module to create a coverage file on disk which can later be imported to NCover. This coverage file is a binary format that the NCover service is able to read. This is necessary to support the mapped memory process used for efficient coverage collection.

After importing the coverage collected by a pre-instrumented process, the execution data is identical to coverage collected by the NCover runtime profiler.

While each module is instrumented separately, all modules loaded in a given process contribute their coverage data to a single coverage file to make it easier to import or transfer for import.

Details for implementing pre-instrumented coverage through integration with MSBuild projects are summarized in more detail here.