[C#] I wish I knew : Stopwatch.StartNew()

15 April 2014 i-wish-i-knew, csharp

I’ve been a professional C# developer for years now, but I’m still discovering trivial stuffs. In “I wish I knew”, I describe a feature that I missed.

When you need to measure the performance of a C# program, you have basically two solutions: either use a profiler or add instrumentation in the source code.

The Stopwatch is the class to use when you want to add instrumentation.

Here is how I’ve been using it for years:

var chrono = new Stopwatch();

chrono.Start();
// perform time-consuming operation
chrono.Stop();

I hate writing this because it bloats the original code. I always wished there existed a shorter solution.

Surprise! There is a static method StartNew() just for that:

var chrono = Stopwatch.StartNew();
// perform time-consuming operation
chrono.Stop();

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