I’ve updated my PerformanceHelper class that I’ll throw around certain code blocks to help trend or monitor performance.  Before it was merely a PerformanceCounter wrapper with a few metrics, but now you can specify Console, Debug and/or Perfmon.  You do this by using an XOR ( ’|’ ) in a new Constructor.  Here’s an example which outputs to Debug.WriteLine and PerfMon:

for (int index = 0; index < 10; index++)
{
    using (new PerformanceHelper("ConsoleSample",
        "Perfmon Sample", OutputOptions.Debug | OutputOptions.Perfmon))
    {
        Thread.Sleep(500);
    }
}

The method that does the Output to Console and Debug is marked as [Conditional("DEBUG")], because you really should have a better strategy for performance monitoring in production and you don’t want that hit for each block that you wrapped.

Note to Vista Developers:  You will have problems creating custom performance counters at runtime based on registry access.  To support this in a client based app, you will need to specify an application manifest and mark it with the following:  

<requestedExecutionLevel  level="requireAdministrator" />

For more information on application manifests, read this.