Performance Problems Continue for VS 2008

by Jonathan Allen on Mar 24, 2008 |

Like its predecessors, Visual Studio 2008 continues to have performance issues. Unlike VS 2003 and 2005, Microsoft is actively working on performance patches, if only you know where to look.

The performance update for Visual Basic projects was announced by the VB Team on March 23. The referenced Knowledge Base article is dated February 22 and the files January 29. While some time for testing is expected, two months seems like more than enough time to plan a more visible announcement.

Back on February 8th, Scott Guthrie announced a web development patch for VS 2008. It too is still not visible on the Visual Studio web site and can only be found through news articles and blog postings. To add insult to injury, Visual Studio does have a "check for updates" function. Like in previous versions, it just goes to the generic Windows Update site.

According to DJ Park, the VB patch covers these scenarios:

The IDE takes a long time to build/rebuild the solution.
You experience a slow response time when you press F5 to start debugging.
You experience a slow response time in the Code Editor.
You experience a slow response time in IntelliSense

Related Editorial

APM Survival Guide from a Veteran Performance Geek

Getting Ahead in the Cloud: The Need for Better Identity and Access Controls

10 Key Guide Points for Continuous Delivery

Why NoSQL - Three Trends Disrupting the Database Status Quo

Enterprises Need Hybrid SSO Solutions to Bridge Internal IT and SaaS

Hello stranger!

You need to Register an InfoQ account or to post comments. But there's so much more behind being registered.

Get the most out of the InfoQ experience.

Tell us what you think

Community comments

Praise Jesus! by Sancho Panza Posted

As if Eclipse was any better... by Jim Leonardo Posted

Re: As if Eclipse was any better... by Sancho Panza Posted

Re: As if Eclipse was any better... by Jeroen van Bergen Posted

Patch for c# by Tao Michael Posted

Java IDEs by Dan Tines Posted

Re: Java IDEs by George Jiang Posted

Re: Java IDEs by Dan Tines Posted

Re: Java IDEs by Geoffrey Wiseman Posted

Re: comments on IDE's by Alan Williamson Posted

Praise Jesus! by Sancho Panza

.Net is a nice platform but I prefer Java just because I'm forced to be tormented by this slow and miserable POS whenever I work with a .net app. With all the advantages of building an application on top of your own operating system MS still can't build an IDE that holds a candle to any of it's Java peers.

As if Eclipse was any better... by Jim Leonardo

I don't get it, most every Java IDE (and I mean REAL IDE, not a glorified text editor) I've ever used has made VS look like a champ performance-wise. JBuilder is maybe the exception of this, but haven't used that in a LONG time. In fact, until very recently, I though Eclipse to be absolutely dreadful (meaning the last 6 months or so) and couldn't understand how people could use it as slow as it was. I hear people whining about performance, but rarely if ever see the same problems. Of course, I do a few tweaks for performance on any set up, but these are always simple things like setting it to not show that silly web page on start up and to not autodownload content.

Patch for c# by Tao Michael

i want other patches for the c#

Re: As if Eclipse was any better... by Sancho Panza

Who said anything about Eclipse? It would probably be my fourth or fifth choice among Java IDEs (though I'd still choose it over VS if I could). My experience over the last eight years with vs.net is that it chokes as soon as you start working with a moderately sized project. When I have to look at the hour glass for three minutes when switching from code view to design view then I quit doing that and vs becomes nothing more than a glorified text editor and that's where it really fails compared to its java peers. The plugins that are required to bring in the functionality already built into the free java IDEs (refactoring, svn, etc) only seem to compound the performance problem. On top of that VS crashes on me forcing a restart several times per week.

I'm not interested in getting into an IDE flame war I just want MS to fix these performance issues so that I can do my job without having my concentration continuously interrupted while trying to perform trivial operations.

Re: As if Eclipse was any better... by Jeroen van Bergen

I don't get it, most every Java IDE (and I mean REAL IDE, not a glorified text editor) I've ever used has made VS look like a champ performance-wise.

Anecdotal evidence is fine, but can you back this up with at least some data? I've used both IntelliJ IDEA and NetBeans quite extensively and have never had a feeling that I was waiting for the IDE, except when performing some big refactoring action, but that is to be expected.

You mention Eclipse which happens to be the only other Java IDE that I have some experience with. And yes, my personal feeling (no hard data here) is that Eclipse is relatively slow.

Java IDEs by Dan Tines

...are not even close to VS's debugging capabilities. And then you have to program in Java and not C# 3.0;)

Re: Java IDEs by George Jiang

in Java 5.0, Dude.

Re: Java IDEs by Dan Tines

In C# 3.0, Dude.

Re: Java IDEs by Geoffrey Wiseman

Not having done much debugging in VS, and none of it for ages -- want to elaborate?

Re: comments on IDE's by Alan Williamson

I think it should be mandatory for all replies to include the age of the poster :-) .... maturity ususlly leads to people posting less biased responses. personally I felt the original post assisted in finding useful information, and wasn't really about a comparing IDE's