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Comment by wvenable | Hacker News Reader

Can anyone describe how the Visual Studio 2010 IDE compares to 2008 IDE performance-wise?

Well, from the past few months of use:

* C# (and possibly others) compile faster * Startup slower than VS 9 (marginal) * Human perf is higher due to better auto-complete etc

Bottomline, if you're happy with VS 9 on your machine (you don't find it too slow), VS 10 is going to be similar.

VS 2010 is slower than VS 2008.

That said, with a $900 machine, ( quad i5, 4 gig ram ) with a last gen video card the most recent RC runs just as fast as VS 2008 did.

Very true. A lot of 2010 perf hit is because of WPF. Real hardware and a good video card is required. I never dreamed that a decent video card would be required for a text editor but it is.

Hardware acceleration is the Microsoft crutch for shitty perf :)

Not that I'm bitter, stuck in VS2008 all day on a circa 2003 machine, stingy ass employers.

They can afford to pay 100k+ for engineers, but not to give them decent machines..

I find it to be about the same in RC in terms of speed for most things. But memory use is lower and the delays when loading things seem to be shorter.

A fast disk is a worthwhile investment. My builds have gotten about 30-40% faster after switching to an SSD.

That said, I was surprised that it wasn't a bigger bump. Turns out builds are more CPU-bound that I thought.

For what it is worth, if your builds are more CPU-bound than you thought then either your solution is very small overall (which I somewhat doubt) or you have it broken up across too many projects. For a good nine years now almost all .net and vs.net -related build slowness has been due primarily to high project count. A bit of solution restructuring should do the trick nicely for you. Merge some projects and/or shift off some less-frequently-modified projects into separate solutions, cook up some official builds of them, and then bring them back in as binary dependencies.

Xaml parsing is WAY faster in VS2010. In VS2008 Xaml parsing would stall my machine for 30s on a regular basis. On VS2010 they seem to do the same file in a second or two. This is a huge difference. Project load is also about 2-3X faster.

Besides that though, they seem pretty similar.

Looking forward to using IntelliTrace.

The VS2010 UI may look similar to 2008, but it's quite different in implementation - the VS2010 UI is all in WPF. There are various benefits from this, but I don't think that speed will be among them.

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