Visual Studio 2005 Accelerators
Visual Studio 2005 is probably one of the most complex pieces of software ever developed. It has so many features, so many tools to (try to) satisfy every developer that is trying to accomplish such a wide variety of tasks, that it is easy to see how a product like that could become very bloated and sluggish.
So, how do I speed it up? Here are some tips I have collected over time:
- Disable the Splash Screen
Add the following parameter to your VS2005 shortcut: “C:Program Files…devenv.exe” -nosplash
Note: the same trick applies to Business Intellgience Managment Studio and SQL Management Studio….
- Install Visual Studio Service Pack 1 get it here.
- Turn off any IDE animated windows
Go to Tools | Options | Environment and uncheck Animate environment tools.
- Get a faster hard drive – seriously
Scott Gu writes: “What you are much more likely to block on is the Seek and I/O speed capacity with which your computer accesses your hard drive. If you are using an application that needs to read/write a lot of files, it is not atypical for your CPU processor utilization to be really low – since the application might be spending most of its time just waiting for the disk operations to complete.”
- Disable Startup Page
Visual Studio tries to download the MSDN rss feed from the Internet at startup. Turn this feature off. Go to Tools | Options | General | Startup | Download content every and uncheck the box.
- Set the Environment to empty at startup
Go to Tools | Options | General | Startup | select Show Empty Environment
- Disable Navigation Bar If you are using ReSharper, you don’t need VS2005 to update the list of methods and fields at the top of the file (CTRL-F12 does this nicely). Go to Tools | Options | Text Editor | C# and uncheck Navigation bar.
- Turn off Track Changes
Go to Tools | Options | Text Editor and uncheck Track changes. This will reduce overhead and speeds up IDE response.
- Turn off Track Active item This will turn off jumping in the explorer whenever you select different files in different projects. Go to Tools | Options | Projects and Solutions and uncheck Track Active Item in Solution Explore. This will ensure that if you are moving across files in different projects, left pane will still be steady instead of jumping around.
- Turn off AutoToolboxPopulate There is an option in VS 2005 that will cause VS to automatically populate the toolbox with any controls you compile as part of your solution. This is a useful feature when developing controls since it updates them when you build, but it can cause VS to end up taking a long time in some circumstances. To disable this option, select the Tools | Options | Windows Forms Designer and then set AutoToolboxPopulate to False.
- Install the Public Hotfix Patch for VS 2005 F5 Debugging Performance Issue with ASP.NET. You can get it here.
- Keep MRU Lists Under Control.
One sure way to slow down the startup of Visual Studio is to have a lot of files and projects in the recent file and recent project lists. This is especially apparent if you have any projects in the MRU list that are located on a networkshare. consider this handy MRU cleaner add-in.
Credits to [Scott Gu, DotNetTipOfTheDay, O’Reilly and thekua]
