Hacker News Reader

Comment by felixmar | Hacker News Reader

The problem with WPF/Silverlight is that Microsoft never managed to make it feel fast enough to compete with native code. The Windows Phone 7 UI is praised because of its excellent performance. Now imagine that Microsoft would have used WPF instead. Because of the Silverlight requirement it's impossible for third party app developers to reach same level of performance as build-in services.

I would like to see a new UI framework that everyone inside Microsoft feels is good enough to use. And give third parties equal access.

View on HN

There are lots of perf problems with SL on WP7 too.

Anyway...from my point of view the biggest problem with the WPF design is that they didn't include the "draw it yourself GDI style" option.

You can AFAIK in WPF (not SL which is a smaller lib subset). You can render it to a GDI Image and then convert that using CreateBitmapSourceFromHBitmap. It sucks though.

Agreed. Visual Studio 2010 is testament to your comment.

I've got a i7 8gig of ram and SSD and VS2010 runs like a complete pig on a year old project. It's unbelievably bad.

Each time I report problems, they close them saying 'cannot reproduce'. So if that's the case, why do people upvote my issues?

Same trouble here. My (work) workstation is a Dual Xeon, 12Gb RAM, SAS 15k disks (to replace the crap SSDs Dell shipped with the machines). We have (using CLOC) about 250K lines of C# (!). MVC3/NHibernate etc. Takes FOREVER to compile and run (3-4 minutes per change). Resharper is unusable. Crashes every 30 mins or so. Using SP1.

I get the same with Microsoft Connect as well. It's a disaster zone.

I hate working with the stack.

I would start with removing Resharper first. While I understand why people like having it around, I've seen it degrading performance of otherwise perfectly capable setup on the same solution which flies on a similar setup without Resharper.

>Resharper is unusable.

That has been true in most every version of VS I have used...almost like Resharper itself sucks from a software engineering point...hmmmm

>Crashes every 30 mins or so. Using SP1.

Try taking off Resharper. I hate how Visual Studio is so unguarded against poorly written components / extensions, but it is. The single biggest point of slowness / crashes I have ever seen is in third party crap, they just figure you'll blame Visual Studio so they don't care.

Ack I don't use R# any more TBH. Dies every 30 mins rather than ever 15 without it so it's a little better... I use the productivity power tools which is good enough.

You can probably find much ranting about R# on stackoverflow from myself.

It's understandable - I have a similar setup (i7 860, 8GB, Intel SSD) and VS2010 runs like a champ. I haven't installed the service pack, though, because all I hear is horror stories. The only time it bogs down for me is when I have Resharper is in "Analyze Errors in Entire Solution" mode, but that's been an ongoing issue for me since... VS2005.

I can confirm to you that the SP1 causes occasional hanging (30+ secs).

There is definitely something weird with the performance of VS 2010 - running it side by side on two identical laptops on the same project one was unusable and the other was perfectly OK.

That might be the graphics card. We purchased ATI FireGL cards to speed up VS performance and it worked!

Any details about this? I am intrigued.

Went from Quadro 2 to ATI FireGL and the UI performance doubled. That is about it.

I will concur. Aside from a memory hog, VS2010 performance has been ok on my dev box which has an NVidia Quadro card in it. However, there are still some quirks in the environment that I attribute to WPF bugs. I have frequent redraw issues even after applying SP1. I also noticed that my installation has a whole lot of trouble with datasets and pulling up the designer file. TFS 2010 issues have been the most frustrating thus far though. They are better with SP1, but still exist.

I have frequent redraw issues as well with Quadro cards. Particularly when moving VS between screens (we have dual monitor setups). It sometimes whites out portions of it. Occasionally as well it just goes batshit and goes white and flickers as well. Oh and the performance sucks on low end Quadro cards. We upped them to ATI FireGL and they seem ok now. Still not happy about the situation.

Have you tried disabling the use of hardware acceleration? WPF seems to have some issues with some graphics cards, or more accurately some graphics cards have some buggy hardware acceleration. Another thing I have noticed is that use over remote desktop and on VMs (specifically VMWare) can have quirks, then again I thought I read somewhere that WPF has to use bitmap remoting instead of primimtive remoting because Windows doesn't offer them any way to take advantage of primitive remoting because they aren't Win32 based (except their root visual which is an HWND, but everything else uses DirectX surfaces), which is a great example of Microsoft teams having pissing contests that just hurts users.

Yeah tried that. Didn't make much difference. I think the main issue with the Quadro's was the poor quality of drivers more than anything else. Even the WHQL ones are junk.

VMware - forget it - unusable. All our infrastructure is VMware based and we have to do remote debugging on VM's via RDP. Yuck. I think when RDP is used it falls back to a GDI+ backend as HW accelerated primitives cannot be thrown down an RDP link and then uses tiles (as you state).

This is all down to the fact that RDP came before DWM. If it was the other way around we'd be throwing surfaces down the wire which would be nice.

>> This is all down to the fact that RDP came before DWM. If it was the other way around we'd be throwing surfaces down the wire which would be nice.

The joke here is that on Vista to Vista RDP connections (.NET 3.0), WPF was properly remoted over the wire and rendered on the client machine instead of bitmaps being sent. This was removed in .NET 3.5. (http://www.virtualdub.org/blog/pivot/entry.php?id=216)

The hardware on the laptops was identical and they had both recently had Windows 7 re-installed. It wasn't a plug-in because the laptops had just been rebuilt and VS 2010 re-installed.

Very odd.

I've had people tell me that they find VS2010 to be a lot faster than 2008 was, along with people who say it's much slower. For me it's about the same (but 2008 was awfully slow to begin with).

Do you have third party things installed like Resharper? My Visual Studio runs like a champ then again I don't install giant steaming piles of shit like Resharper, which has always struck me as something that was written by idiots or drunken monkeys. The fact that so many people install tons of add ins and extensions and then say 'Visual Studio perf sucks' baffles me. It is like installing a bunch of crap toolbars in IE and then saying 'IE perf sucks'.

I did but I don't now. Your solution probably doesn't have 50 projects and quarter of a million lines of c# code in it (oh and another 1/2 million lines of XML and T-SQL).

well everyone seems to love Resharper - I think you're the first I've encountered who didn't like it. other than myself, I can't stand it.

I'm on a team of approximately 15 people. At least 11 of them hate it. I think R#'s hate is silent hate as far as publicising goes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com