Update: The speed issues I complained about in the original version of this post have been remedied (as far as I can tell) by “Hotfix for Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 - KB946581″ which you can find here: Downloadable Hotfix: Performance and Editor fixes for Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Web Developer Express 2008. Thanks to David and Cameron from Microsoft for helping me out with this!
If you’d like to read the original post, you can find it below, but keep in mind that most of this rant is now moot. Enjoy! 
Disclaimer: I will *happily* post a retraction to this rant if *anyone* can tell me how to make Visual Studio 2008 perform like Visual Studio 2005 did, or better. My intention here is not to offend (despite the title of this post) but to pique some interest in the community as to how to speed up this beast of a program.I’m a software engineer for a web development company, developing code in C# and ASP.NET. Thus, the tool I use most in my daily work, of course, is Visual Studio. I’ve been happily using Visual Studio 2005, well, since 2005, and have enjoyed it thoroughly. Everything it does (for me), it does well, from IntelliSense to the integration with source control. So, when my company decided to upgrade all its developers’ copies of Visual Studio 2005 to Visual Studio 2008, I had no reservations. I’d heard about things like better JavaScript handling (with IntelliSense as well), split Design/Code view in Web Developer, and, well, it just looked slicker than 2005 in general.
Now, less than a couple months after our upgrade, I use a text editor (Notepad2, for what it’s worth) almost exclusively for writing and modifying code. Why? Because Visual Studio 2008 is slow, unwieldy, slow, memory hogging and *really damn slow*.
(I see this the majority of the time Visual Studio is open.)
I have tried everything I can possibly think of to wrestle with this beast. Cleaned my hard drive, reinstalled Windows XP, installed VS2008, removed all components but Web Developer and C#/ASP.net (no C++, VB, mobile development tools, etc.). Before you ask, my development machine has the following specs:
- Intel Centrino (Core Duo T2300) @ 1.66GHz
- 2GB of DDR2-667 RAM
- 80GB SATA2 Hard Drive
Not the fastest machine on the block, but it should be more than sufficient to do web development. Typically, when I’m doing web development, I have four programs open: Outlook, Visual Studio, Firefox and Internet Explorer. Even with only these four programs open and only two tabs open in each browser, I see the (Not Responding) message in Visual Studio’s title bar more often than not.
Loading the environment takes anywhere from 30 seconds (fast) to two minutes (most of the time). Closing the program takes about the same amount of time. Opening a C# source code file takes 15-20 seconds, with the hourglass spinning and most of the time the window won’t repaint at all during this time. If I make the rare mistake of attempting to click into “Design” mode when viewing an ASPX page, my whole system locks up. No response from any windows, and even Ctrl+Alt+Delete takes 5-10 seconds to slowly paint the dialog with its options.
Possibly the most disappointing part of all this is the fact that Visual Studio 2008 was touted for its speed increases.
So, to wrap this up, if you have some good tips or tricks for (drastically) speeding up the performance of Visual Studio 2008, please leave a comment on this post. I’d love to hear from you, and I’m sure a lot of other Visual Studio 2008 users would love to hear from you as well.
Posted by willwm Filed in Uncategorized
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