I Still Have Low Expectations For Visual Studio 2010

25 commentsWritten on January 25th, 2010 by
Categories: IDE

Last 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 it.  Microsoft has been working hard on the performance of VS2010 ever since.  Today i read a new post from Brian Harry about the results of their performance improvements.

Some quotes that make me cringe:

The performance is acceptable now and I would consider the product generally shippable…

Acceptable? One of the originally stated goals for Visual Studio 2010 was better performance over 2008.  At this point, it should be more than acceptable IMO!

I've been running the SLCTP3 for about 3.5 hours today and its been amazing. Previously I would have crashed at least 2 times and had insane perf issues.

I can only hope that it runs without crashing and insane performance issues for those of us who are using it 8 hours (or more) a day…

I'd say the performance is about equal or maybe slightly better in some scenarios than VS2008.

I find this very disappointing… again, it was supposed to be faster than VS2008

VS2008 still feels snappier when compared side-by-side on the same VM, but the performance doesn't bother me in this build of VS2010.

I’m glad it doesn’t bother Brian, but i sure as hell would prefer that the new version is at least faster and snappier than the previous version

Build time is 10-15% longer for the same solution compared to 2008

Excuse me? Build time in 2008 is already ridiculously slow for large solutions… the fact that it has gotten slower on the same hardware is simply unacceptable

Compilation of WPF project is >500% slower on VS 2010 SLCTP 3

Wow… just wow

Intellisense pop-ups are slow to pop up

It’s not like we need those to be fast, right?

For those of you who think i’m making a big deal out of this, you might be right.  But i’m often working with large solutions and i frequently have multiple instances of VS running at the same time.  The performance of VS2008 is at times embarrassingly bad and to think that VS2010 is not going to improve this, and likely even make the situation worse is something that i can’t really be happy about. 

Can’t we just get a Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack with support for .NET 4.0 instead?

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This entry was posted on Monday, January 25th, 2010 at 12:46 and is filed under IDE. You can subscribe to any comments to this entry via RSS 2.0. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  • http://www.technologies-dotnet.be Kris-I

    Don’t be so negative Davy :)

  • http://davybrion.com Davy Brion

    @Kris-I

    like i said: “But i’m often working with large solutions and i frequently have multiple instances of VS running at the same time. The performance of VS2008 is at times embarrassingly bad and to think that VS2010 is not going to improve this, and likely even make the situation worse is something that i can’t really be happy about.”

  • http://bjarte.com Bjarte

    Time to hand-roll my own IDE :)

  • http://www.colourcoding.net/blog Julian Birch

    What really worried me about this quote: “The performance is acceptable now and I would consider the product generally shippable…” was a sneaking suspicion that the next word in this comment was “but”.

  • http://www.filehelpers.com Marcos

    Davy

    Another vote for: “Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack with support for .NET 4.0″

    I must admit that I love winforms, we develop an ERP and other enterprise software and winforms is pretty cool for us.

    I can’t understand why the VS team went to the direction of use WPF for the editor. They jump from unmanaged direct to WPF with all the performance problems that all the word are complain about, of course that them sure has some solid arguments, but performance not is one of them.

    Davy: If your big solutions has multiple projects are you tried to use a RAM Disk for the obj, bin and release folders ? that really speed up all the disk access to copy project by project the referenced assemblies and the just build ones. If you wanna known how we do just drop me a line.

    Cheers

  • http://davybrion.com Davy Brion

    @Marcos

    i’d definitely be interested in hearing about that :)

  • http://kozmic.pl Krzysztof Koźmic

    and where’s JetBrains’ IDE for .NET?

    Who said you can’t compete with Microsoft on this market?
    Seriously,I would switch in a heartbeat.

  • Your previous post

    “A lot of the people in the ALT.NET community are still too negative in expressing their views, or have even stopped trying altogether.”

    Something to think about.

  • http://davybrion.com Davy Brion

    there’s a difference between being negative when it comes to discussing approaches and something that you’re going to be subjected to every single workday, all day long.

    i can’t see how i could possible be positive about something like that

  • http://ramonsmits.com Ramon Smits

    Indeed a RAM disk speedsup compilation as it increases disk IO. We use this on our build server for temporary fetching and compilation but not on workstations ofcourse.

    I also find VS2010 damn too slow. We also have several large solutions and I often have several open at once. This was impossible to work with back then and since then I just do not really believe in a high performance version coming soon.

  • liviu

    Hi,

    I am also hugely disappointed by both IDEs 2008,2010. I gave Sharpdevelop a try for 3.5 and even Mirador 4.0 that has .net 4.0 support. It works great and it is very “snappier”. Build time is better than vs for small solution, NUNIT integrated.

    …

  • Kris-I

    Scott Gu on twitter :

    VS 2010 RC performance within a VM is much, much better. Performance in general on lower end machines is better Improvement from Beta2 RT Recent build of VS2010 is really a joy to use. People will like what they see when it goes public ”

    Will see …

  • http://www.jphamilton.net J.P. Hamilton

    I feel your pain. VS 2010 is at times almost unusable. Any IDE that functions slower than my brain is unacceptable. There are many times I find myself staring at an hourglass wondering what it could be doing. I don’t really appreciate the fact that it wants to lock up for 30 seconds in order to do some “code analysis” for me and show an intellisense dropdown.

  • http://weblogs.asp.net/bleroy Bertrand Le Roy

    One thing you didn’t quote: “We are following up on all of these with survey respondents. We are not done with performance or functional improvements”

  • chrissie1

    Another vote for: “Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack with support for .NET 4.0″

    I must be getting old, I used to like new toys.

  • Leon Breedt

    DevDiv needs to be “Windows 7′d”.

  • http://davybrion.com Davy Brion

    @Bertrand

    i don’t really have a lot of confidence in them anymore, so that statement holds no value with me whatsoever

    @Leon

    agreed

  • Mark

    On a day to day basis, we have to work with large solutions. We’ve made as few projects as possible and there is no scope for reducing the project count further, and yet VS still chugs along quite badly at times. Now we’re being told that VS2010 isn’t going to improve the performance and may even be slower?

    Give me performance improvements over a WPF UI any day of the week. It’s cool that MS like to dog-food and push their own tech, but not when it’s at the expense of improving a part of the IDE that is known to be slow and frustrating. I mean, even changing project configurations using the combo box (switch from debug to release / x86/x64 etc.) is enough to hang VS for a good 15 seconds in large solutions, it’s ridiculous.

  • alwin

    From Brian Harry’s post: “And remember, all of these results are from people who complained about Beta 2 performance (not the 70% of people who didn’t).”

    If 30% of my customers would be complaining about performance I would be very very embarrassed.

  • alwin

    Oh sorry I misread that, that was for Beta 2. I certainly hope it’s better now :)

  • Nick

    Another vote for retaining VS2008 with .NET 4.0 support here. Although 2008 is still too slow, particularly in large solutions, and particularly when you have multiple instances open (which those of us working in slightly convoluted source control branch structures will often do).

  • http://jack-fx.com Jack

    “the performance is about equal or maybe slightly better in some scenarios than VS2008.” :)

  • http://rsolution.be Roel Strauven

    So why are there still so many programmers/companies choosing for the .Net world?
    Every project has it’s own requirements, so why making always the same technology choice?

    When i read: “VS2008 WPF slow, VS2010 WPF 500% slower” that scares me..

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  • http://irritatedvowel.com/blog Pete

    The 500% slower comment is direct feedback from a customer, not a quote from Brian. It may be a very specific scenario. Even in the beta I have not personally seen a 5x difference in WPF project compilation perf between 2008 and 2010, and I do compile both WPF and Silverlight projects of various sizes daily.

    Pete
    Windows Client Dev Community Program Manager
    (Opinions are my own)

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