Like its predecessors, Visual Studio 2008 continues to have performance issues. Unlike VS 2003 and 2005, Microsoft is actively working on performance patches, if only you know where to look.
The performance update for Visual Basic projects was announced by the VB Team on March 23. The referenced Knowledge Base article is dated February 22 and the files January 29. While some time for testing is expected, two months seems like more than enough time to plan a more visible announcement.
Back on February 8th, Scott Guthrie announced a web development patch for VS 2008. It too is still not visible on the Visual Studio web site and can only be found through news articles and blog postings. To add insult to injury, Visual Studio does have a "check for updates" function. Like in previous versions, it just goes to the generic Windows Update site.
According to DJ Park, the VB patch covers these scenarios:
- The IDE takes a long time to build/rebuild the solution.
- You experience a slow response time when you press F5 to start debugging.
- You experience a slow response time in the Code Editor.
- You experience a slow response time in IntelliSense