If you are unfamiliar with PerfView, there are PerfView video tutorials. As well as Vance Morrison's blog which also gives overview and getting started information.

The PerfView executable is ultimately published at the PerfView download Site. It is a standalone executable file (packaged in a ZIP archive). You can be running it in less than a minute!

The PerfView user’s guide is part of the application itself, however you can get the .HTM file for it in the user’s guide in the source code itself at PerfView/SupportDlls/UsersGuide.htm, however it is a significantly better experience if you simply download PerfView and select the Help -> User's Guide menu item.

###How to Build and Debug PerfView PerfView is designed to build in Visual Studio 2013 or later.

The solution file is src/PerfView/Perfview.sln. Opening this file in Visual file and selecting the Build -> Build Solution, will build it. It follows standard Visual Studio conventions, and the resulting PerfView.exe file ends up in the src/PerfView/bin//PerfView.exe You need only deploy this one EXE to use it.
The solution consists of 11 projects, representing support DLLs are the main EXE. To run PerfView in the debugger (F5) you need to make sure that the 'Startup Project' is set to the 'PerfView' project so that it launches the main EXE. If the PerfView project is not bold, right click on the PerfView project in the 'Solution Explorer (on right) and select 'Set as Startup Project'. After doing this 'Start Debugging' (F5) should work. (it is annoying that this is not part of the .sln file...).

####Information for build troubleshooting.

One of the unusual things about PerfView is that it incorporates its support DLL into the EXE itself, and these get unpacked on first launch. This means that there are tricky dependencies in the build that are not typical. You will see errors that certain DLLs can't be found if there were build problems earlier in the build. Typically you can fix this simply by doing a normal (non-clean) build, since the missing file will be present from the last compilation. If this does not fix things, see if the DLL being looked for actually exists (if it does, then rebuilding should fix it). It can make sense to go down the project one by one and build them individually to see which one fails 'first'.
Another unusual thing about PerfView is that it includes an extension mechanism complete with samples of using that. This extensions is the 'Global' project (Called that because it is the Global Extension whose commands don't have a 'scope') and needs to refer to PerfView to resolve some of its references. Thus you will get many 'not found' issues in the 'Global' project. These can be ignored until you get every other part of the build working.

###Code Organization The code is broken in several main sections:

TraceEvent - Library that understands how to decode Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) which is used to actually collect the data for many investigations
PerfView - GUI part of the application
MainWindow - GUI code for the window that is initially launched (lets you select files or collect new data)
StackViewer - GUI code for any view with the 'stacks' suffix
EventViewer - GUI code for the 'events' view window
Dialogs - GUI code for a variety of small dialog boxes (although the CollectingDialog is reasonably complex)
Memory - Contains code for memory investigations, in particular it defines 'Graph' and 'MemoryGraph' which are used to display node-arc graphs (e.g. GC heaps)

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PerfView

README.md