Speeding up Visual Studio 2008
Jul13Written by:
2009/07/13 09:04 AM 
Over the last couple of weeks and months my Visual Studio 2008 has been dragging its heels. Been running very slowly, especially when switching from code view to design view. It could take up to a minute to actually display anything in the design view. This was getting extremely frustrating to say the least. So I did a little investigation and found a few things that you can do to increase that Visual Studio Speed.
Download SP1 and any Hotfixes. Like any piece of software, keeping up to date is of prime importance. So go to the Microsoft site and Download the hotfix and service pack.
The SP1 can be found here. Remember it is a rather large download for those who are bandwidth challenged. It is more than 800mb.
A particular speed hotfix and details can be found here
Clear out the Cache. You will be amazed as to how much Visual Studio caches websites for faster loading and compiling. But problem is it does not clear it out. There are two folders that can have a huge amount of files and subfolders in it that Visual Studio reads IDE interaction. Some can even have more thatn 10 000 folders listed, I had 1200. Go to these folders and delete all but the most recent named projects that you are working on.
C:\Users\[user name]\AppData\Local\Microsoft\WebSiteCache
C:\Users\[user name]\AppData\Local\Temp\Temporary ASP.NET Files\siteName
Reset un-needed settings. Visual Studio has some cool setting to help enhance the user experience. But often times these are unnecessary and can consume resources and precious CPU cycles. Check out these setting under your options menu:
- Turn off validation
- Turn off the Navigation Bar
- Show Live Semantic Errors
- Track changes
- Animate environment tools
- Compile for the correct platform
- Speed up debugging by removing breakpoints
- Formatting XML for easy diff
Find out all the details at the original post: Speed up Visual Studio – EPiServer Labs.
Compile for a particular platform. If you are not specifically building apps that are meant for 64 bit or taking advantage of any x64 instructions, then specify the platform that you are building for. If you specify for x86 your program would most likely also sun under x64, but also compile faster.
Go to your configurations manager and enter a specific platform. I used x86. If you do program for the x64 platform then you can enter a separate configuration for that and then be specific when you compile, choosing which platform to compile for.
I hope this helps. If you have made all or any of these changes and have seen some improvement, please drop us a comment and let us know. It would be great for others to see that this works.
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