Rico Mariani: Inside Visual Studio Beta 2 - Performance and Reliability

Posted By: Charles | Oct 20th @ 8:48 AM | 30,642 Views | 25 Comments
I caught up with the great Rico Mariani, Visual Studio's Chief Software Architect, after his keynote at a VS partner conference held on the Microsoft campus. He tells us all about the improvements in Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2. Rico and team have taken the performance and reliability of Visual Studio to new levels in this release. Gone are the days of synchronous assembly and COM component reference look-ups (woo hoo!!!). Gone are the long start up times. Gone are roughly 90% of the performance bottlenecks that slowed down the development experience inside the VS2010 Beta 1 IDE. The Visual Studio development team worked their tails off to improve perf and reliability across the board. Tune in to learn about what they did and what they will do prior to RTM. Truly excellent engineering goes on in building 42. Well done, team!

Rico also discusses his final blog post in his VS history series, a 5,000 word up to the minute historical piece. After watching Tina's great VS documentary series, Rico decided to add his own perspective in a 10 part blog post blitz. Great stuff!

Enjoy.
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#Oct 20th @ 9:22 AM
dot_tom
dot_tom

Rico is The Man! I'm so glad he's keeping an eye on VS's future.

#Oct 20th @ 9:40 AM
exoteric
exoteric
I : Next<I>

For the nightmare tab it really ought to have a search box. Don't know if you fixed this for beta 2.

#Oct 20th @ 1:09 PM
Coconut
Coconut
nurbs dude

Is it just me? I think Rico lost some hairs since last time I saw him on video.

#Oct 20th @ 1:41 PM
TheBanjomatic
TheBanjomatic

So if the fuzzy font issue was fixed by changing WPF to use DirectWrite, does that mean that Visual Studio users running XP and Vista will still have to endure the blurry text?

#Oct 20th @ 2:08 PM
ricomariani
ricomariani
Perf Dude

I beleive WPF includes the needed bits downlevel.  We tested on a mix of Vista/W7 mainly.  We should get a WPF dude to give us the full details.

#Oct 20th @ 2:25 PM
Ian E-T
Ian E-T

Rico's correct, it's a bit different under the covers but the blurry text problem is also fixed on XP and Vista, it's not just a Win7 thing.

#Oct 20th @ 2:56 PM
rhm
rhm

If .NET 4 runs on XP at all, then I think it's safe to assume they merged the DirectWrite text rendering engine into WPF so it's available everywhere .NET 4 is. Would kinda suck otherwise, although I can't confirm either way.

 

Anyway, Lord of Visual Studio... I'd watch that!  I mean it couldn't be any more dull than Lord of the Rings was.

#Oct 20th @ 3:30 PM
TheBanjomatic
TheBanjomatic

Thats kind of what I'm hoping, the DirectWrite presentation at PDC last year was great, but I was kind of disappointed with the lack of support for XP and Vista (though I understand Vista support is in the works). If .NET4's implementation of WPF exposes parts of DirectWrite, then thats great... if DirectWrite will be available to native coders on XP, even better...

 

DirectWrite always struck me as more of a library than an OS dependent feature. Being able to treat it like a library and use the same code path for all text rendering (even if it just falls back on GDI for XP under the covers) would have been very useful.

 

At any rate, its good to hear that this fix works on XP as well (though I should hopefully be running windows 7 at work by the time Dev10 is released)

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