Performance Improvements in Visual Studio 2008

Posted By: Beth Massi | Jul 24th, 2007 @ 9:40 AM

In this in interview Cameron McColl, a Developer on the Visual Basic Team, shows us what kinds of performance improvements were made in Visual Studio 2008. He walks us through a set of scenarios that suffered from performance issues and then shows us the same scenarios in Visual Studio 2008 describing what was happening and how they fixed the issues.

0:00 – 1:45	Intro / History
1:45	Stepping in the IDE
4:08	Too Many Errors in the Task List
6:18	Favorite Fix
7:48	IDE Locks Up on Large Solutions
11:42	Editor Delay with Large Web Apps
13:56	Rebuild All on Large Web Apps

Tags: Orcas, VB Team, VB.NET, Visual Studio

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PerfectPhase
"This is not war, this is pest control!" - Dalek to Cyberman

Nice video, enjoyed that. Tthought it was presented very well!

LPCRoy

Please Please Please tell me that you fixed the performance problems around the help system Smiley

I still cringe every time I have to hit "F1" because I know the IDE is going to lock up for the next 3 minutes

simdoc

How about with C++ applications? My C++ solution is about 43 projects with > 5000 files. Its top level project is a DLL that gets loaded into MS Office applications. Attaching the debugger to the executable is very, very slow in VS2005 (before and after SP1), especially when using a symbol server. Most importantly it blocks the IDE until the debugger is attached.

Earlier versions (e.g., 2003) at least did not block the IDE while attaching the debugger. This allowed you to browse files, set breakpoints, and do other tasks while waiting for the attach to complete. Sometimes you would even cancel the debugging session BEFORE the attachment was complete if you realized that another change was desired before actually debugging the solution. None of this is possible anymore because of the IDE block. I think I've wasted more time with this performance issue than any other (except for maybe the C1023 errors that occur for some unexplicable reason after retrieving code changes from other users in TFS).

Has this been improved of fixed? I plan on trying 2008 Beta 2 in the near future.

offwhite
Me

I have these problems in VS 2005. Will these fixes make their way to VS 2005 which I will have to use until VS 2008 is released?

rsclient

And my god! The Intellisense file went from OK to absolutely effing huge in 2005. There's nothing like starting up a project, seeing the "updating intellisense" and knowing that you might as well just wander off into other peoples meetings for an hour or so.

TheWeeScot

Hi simdoc,

I can't really speak for the C++ improvements too much although I understand that they made some significant improvements to Intellisense for 2008.

I would highly recommend you try out your solution with the Beta2 release now that it's available. If you still see performance issues please contact the C++ performance team directly at vcperf@microsoft.com

Thanks.
Cameron McColl

TheWeeScot

Hi offwhite,

Unfortunately we can't make any promises about which performance improvements will be ported back to VS2005.
However we are addressing this on a case by case basis and we may have some hotfixes soon that address some of these issues.

I'll try and post an update to this when I have more info.

Thanks
Cameron McColl

TheWeeScot

Hi rsclient,

Since you are referring to an Intellisense file I'm going to assume you mean C++.
The performance improvements listed above refer to Visual Basic and I'm happy to report that for VB the Intellisense story is much improved. We have move some of the expensive first time loading of Intellisense off the UI thread and onto a background thread. This results in a much more responsive UI (the way it should be).

As for C++, try out the VS2008 Beta and if you still see performance issues with Intellisense let them know at vcperf@microsoft.com

Also just a reminder to folks reading this. You can report VB performance issues at vbperf@microsoft.com and C# performance issues at vcsperf@microsoft.com

Thanks.
Cameron McColl

ray.joyce

BUT...

Have you fixed the following vb.net large project issues:
1. compiler crashes!!
2. compiler actually compiles.. and not crash at run time for a linking/syntax error..
3. go to sleep thread problems with multi core processors
4. IDE Lockup with VSS
5. IDE freeze when VSS updating ( > 30 minutes)..
6. Have the WAP type IDE bugs been fixed, i.e broken sync with designer files, publishing bugs ( wrong files vss2, debug etc problems).

All of 1 to 5 were reported before VS 2005 release date!, but have not been fixed in SP1...

So what about vs 2008..
Also based upon vs 2005 experience when is vs 2008 SP1 due for release.. One would never again take a x.0 release of any MSoft product..

[C]