What it does
The Developer Dashboard feature of SharePoint 2010 is a kick-butt tool and something like an uber version of the page trace you can get from ASP.NET. It's geared for SharePoint so knows about SharePoint-y things as well as SQL calls to the content database and other cool stuff. However it is limited and doesn't offer a ton of customization other than what you get OOTB. This project kicks things up a notch and is like the developer equivalent of YSlow for Firebug by providing you with a visualization of the page load. This is great in finding bottlenecks and deciding where to start with your code optimization (or if you have some troublesome webpart).
How it works
It's jQuery man, and that's a good thing. Actually it doesn't do much other than re-present what the dashboard already contains however trying to decipher the call stack from numbers is for the birds. The visualization is nice and helpful in trying to wrap your head around what your web parts are doing. The package is cool as a WSP so deployment is a breeze. It just adds a new ASCX control to the AdditionalPageHead delegate control and spits out additional javascript tags. You'll need to turn the developer dashboard on to see the results but the install was simple and worked great.
Bottom line
This is just the beginning of hopefully a lot of add-on tools for developers. SharePoint 2010 offers a lot of great tools but sometimes their visibility is lost or hard to find. Tools like this are simple add-ons for your development environment and low hanging fruit to help you along. Even if you're not looking for code bottlenecks (who is?) it's nice to have this on the page so you *can* take a look and say "Hmmm, I should really look into that long call to load". I'm not saying let's install these tools and go nuts on pre-optimization, but knowing about something is half the battle. Install this on your VM and pull it out from time to time.
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