Very Low Expectations For Visual Studio 2010
Posted by Davy Brion on December 6th, 2009
Visual Studio 2010 has long been announced as a release where a lot of focus would go to the actual performance of the product. As most of you probably know, Visual Studio 2008 is already quite slow when working with large solutions. I really hoped that Visual Studio 2010 would solve that problem, so i was already quite worried when reports first came out that VS 2010 would be using WPF.
I’ve avoided the beta releases of VS 2010, and whenever i saw someone demo it i cringed when i saw how slow it reacted, even while writing code. And now i just read this post from one of the people in charge of Visual Studio 2010. Reading that post just sends chills down my spine. While they seem to be actively working on improving the performance of VS 2010, i think it’s very late in the product cycle for news like this to come out. With only about 3 months left before the release, i really wonder whether they can still deliver on their promise of a fast Visual Studio, and i certainly hope that late performance improvements don’t cause any annoying bugs.
Oh well, if it turns out to be a crappy Visual Studio release, we only have to wait 2 or 3 more years before they’ll fix it, right? Right? Guys?
December 6th, 2009 at 7:59 pm
Well no Visual Studio distribution was totally stable before SP1, so let’s wait SP1…2 xD
December 6th, 2009 at 8:01 pm
i wouldn’t label Visual Studio 2008 SP1 entirely stable either
December 6th, 2009 at 8:06 pm
I have never seen a version of vs handle large projects well. I never expected 2010 to break this tradition.
December 7th, 2009 at 3:04 am
You’re worried about how the release version will perform because a beta release has problems running on an Atom processor (a slow, single-core one, to make things worse) with integrated graphics and a slow hard drive?
A bit too early to be concerned about such matters, don’t you think?
December 7th, 2009 at 7:00 am
@Jeremy
if integrated graphics impact the performance of an _IDE_, then yes, i’m concerned. How could you _not_ be?
December 7th, 2009 at 7:29 am
Although I have to be careful to not violate my NDA, I can assure you that the performance has been drastically improved in the the latest bits of Visual Studio 2010 especially concerning the Silverlight and WPF designers. Using R# in Visual Studio 2010 unfortunately negatively impacts performance as well.
December 7th, 2009 at 7:55 am
I totally agree that VS 2010 is way slower than VS 2008 which isn’t fast either. I installed Beta2 and besides being slow, it crashes all the time too. Not very usable, so I’ve started to look for alternatives. I’ve had some good experiences with SharpDevelop in the past and MonoDevelop seems to be coming around as well, but still behind SharpDevelop and VS. The real pain is not having Resharper in these alternative IDE’s which is actually the only reason I stick with VS for now. If JetBrains ever decides to extend SharpDevelop, then VS is out! That’s not going to happen anytime soon, off course.
December 8th, 2009 at 7:03 am
I remember that a couple of years ago JetBrains was seriously considering of creating a IDE for .NET developers. Too bad that they decided to cancel this project.
About the performance of Visual Studio 2010: i have Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 installed on my development workstation running Windows XP Pro x64. I am also running the latest bits of Visual Studio 2010 virtualized (VMware Workstation 7, Windows 7) and the performance of Visual Studio 2010 in the virtual machine is much better than the Beta 2 installed on the host OS.
Just don’t dismiss Visual Studio 2010 yet. To make sure that Beta 2 was as stable as possible, there were so changes that did not make it to this release. We must embrace the fact that Microsoft is offering these Betas and CTPs and we should not judge the RTM on the quality of the early drops.
December 9th, 2009 at 10:07 am
Beta 2 is OK, even for reasonable sized solutions, but then my developer machine was recently upgraded to Core i7 with 12GB of memory and 10k RPM SATA disks.
VS2008 is quite fast now, hopefully we won’t need to wait for Core i9 to become commodity for 2010 to be usable
YMMV, I amortize the cost of startup by keeping 6-8 instances of VS open, enough memory for all of them to be mostly in cache.
January 25th, 2010 at 12:46 pm
[...] month i told you i had very low expectations for Visual Studio 2010 from a performance point of view. Luckily, i was not alone as many people complained about [...]