Having used Visual Studio for 10 years and even written a book on it I can say I am totally tired of this huge and bloated IDE and can't wait until I am done with .NET work or MonoDevelop is good enough to switch. (it's getting close)
I honestly don't find it to be that bloated either. it loads up very quickly, and it only loads things as they are needed. If you never once use the Entity Framework for example, nothing related to it will ever load. This is different from 2008 which eager loaded most stuff.
There was a huge push to get 2010 up to performance snuff towards the end of development, and I think they mostly succeeded.
The new support for MEF for extending things is dramatically better than VSIP, which was a nightmare no matter how you sliced it. MEF is actually quite pleasant.
I'm an ex MS employee, and so feel no need to promote it blindly. I do think, overall, it's the best VS yet. Take it for what you will.
What I really wanted to address was performance. There was indeed a huge push after Beta2 to improve perf. At the end of the day 2010 is still slower than 2008 and eats up more memory. I guess that's an accomplishment if sucking less is considered good. But will people upgrade? I don't know. Hopefully because that's good for me. But I am pessimistic and currently looking for other employment as the experience was that bad.
Why was it so bad? Well I feel most of the pain points could have been avoided. Management ignored a lot of the performance/memory issues last summer and had an attitude of ship ship ship with NO regard for quality. I was responsible for reporting an overall grade for the areas I tested. I reported them to be poor and fair. I also listed all the known bugs in those areas. Management boosted the rating to good on the basis that memory and performance bugs don't count.
Let me reemphasize that last point: I was told memory and performance bugs DID NOT count towards the overall quality rating of the product. This was management's attitude through most of the product cycle. We could never give an honest assessment of the product because they would challenge it and argue that it wasn't that bad.
I believe their reason was simple for doing this. They need to take the data to their managers and up the chain of command to paint a pretty picture of how great the product is. Even if that's an illusion. Basically telling the truth of product quality is punished. If I lied about quality managers would be ecstatic about how a great a job we did. If I told the truth about quality instead of thanking me for figuring out where customer pain points might be the attitude was ALWAYS this should have been found earlier. The problem is many times I did find it earlier and they did their best to bury it before the next meeting they were heading off too report product quality.
I will say this. IntelliSense is much better for C++. Even though other native tools might suck. IntelliSense teams seems to be doing a pretty good job. It has always has been my favorite VS feature.
And is 2010 worth the upgrade for most people? Hard to say. There's nothing in it that is truly mind blowing or "must have", it just iterates and improves a ton of stuff. I don't think .NET 4 alone is a compelling enough reason, most will remain happy with 2/3/3.5 for the time being.
With all that said, I still stand behind VS2010. I think it still came together well. I really do hope I get to use it as my day to day environment, I like it that much more than 2008. I'm actually impressed how well it emerged out of the chaos that is DevDiv :)
And yes, MS has dropped the ball on native dev quite a bit. It's definitely an afterthought. But most people who are looking to get 2010 are very much in the managed camp.
Good! Well, good for internal I mean. If managed/WPF/etc are the future of Windows, then MS needs to start eating their own dog food and using those techs for their apps. It drives me utterly nuts to think of all the neat tools that show up in Windows that other MS divisions flat out ignore.
Rumor has it WPF is going the way of Windows Forms. It will be supported but no new features. With that in mind, think of all the UI frameworks MS has had wrapping up Win32: MFC, ATL/WTL, WinForms, WPF. Nothing seems to stick. Office just writes their own stuff that they KNOW they can depend on it being there. Duplication sure. But DevDiv is notorious for releasing things and deprecating the past "great" technology within a few years.
There is another reason they ignore the new tools: managed is slow for the client. For the server world managed is great and has won. Nobody in their right mind would write native web apps. They write the stuff that needs to be native (db, webserver) then glue the app together with python, ruby, C#, or Java (I know, a vast oversimplification of webapps).
Clients don't have the advantage of the webapps. We don't have a lot of computer to do things in parallel. Every millisecond counts to make the app appear as responsive as possible.
Why does managed suck for the client? JITing is slow and the code it generates isn't nearly as good as a compiler. NGENing is possible but still slow because of garbage collection and marshaling data between native and managed code. Little things like that add up and slow down responsiveness a lot on the UI side of things and that is what the user notices and complains about.
For C#, VS is absolutely wonderful, and I haven't seen an IDE for a statically typed language I like better.
I haven't used the later in ~12 months but I don't remember them being particularly speedy in comparison.
The only things I truly find insufferably slow in VS are the visual designers which do code-gen "on the fly".
plus the option for commercial support.
I'm an ungrateful sod, I know..
EDIT: wanted to ADD and didn't notice I was replying to myself
That said, I once thought Emacs was bloated. Now, it's quite nimble compared to other programming tools.
On Emacs ... you still have to pay attention to the loaded extensions, and if you've got dozens of them (especially the Jdee extension, with all the dependencies) it can be as bloated as a full IDE (and it shows in startup times).
While he's fat, it's not clear why it matters. (It matters to his health but not to the bus passengers.)
In what ways does the VS "bloat" matter?
Basically, it will not run on a small netbook. Not at acceptable speeds.
And it still runs Django faster than my company-issued 4 gig Windows Core 2 Duo laptop.
So, "bloat" is relative to your machine. What's "bloated" today is not going to be bloated 5-10 years from now, and vice versa. If this isn't what you're talking about, you're using the wrong word.
Actually, bloat is measurable. It's the difference between being able to use a tiny netbook for a whole day without bothering to recharge it (provided you have a big enough battery pack) and having to be tethered to a desk for the whole day.
Of course I would love to have 16 cores of pure performance, 32 gigs of RAM, a couple terabytes of wicked fast SSD storage. Unfortunately, I wouldn't be able to fold it up, throw it in my shoulder bag and leave the office in order to work from a charming cafe while I watch the sunset. At least not for the next five years or so.
Everybody has priorities.
For Asp.net, my sister went on a small project and I don't understand why the hell it does take lot of time to process pages.