Hi all,
I will be developing an ASP.NET application soon. Now I need to setup a new dev environment. However, I had very bad experience with VS2005 in 2006. The IDE was slow, buggy, slow, crash often, slow...main issue was very very very slow.
So I am now comtemplating to go back to VS2003. But before I make a decision I just want to get some advice from the gurus on the following:
1) Is VS2005 any better now with SP1? As in does the IDE work properly now, as in working smoothly during normal development?
2) Can someone recommend to me a hardware specs where VS2005 can work smoothly in? (I used to have a PC running at 2.4GHz with 2GB ram and it still runs terribly slow!)
3) If I do want to dev in VS2003, does anyone know where I can purchase a copy of VS2003? I can't find it in Singapore thus far.
Thanks all you gurus
How about.... Visual Studio 2008?
You are putting yourself at a disadvantage remaining with .NET v1 unless the application to be developed is so simple that feature/library enhancements from .NET v2 or 3 does not offer an edge at all. After using Generics, Nullable types, ASP.NET 2.0 improvements, it is quite hard to go back to v1. Like classic ASP before it, I perceive v1 as that of legacy maintenance.
Also "slow" is measured in several different aspects; which particular area do you find "slow"? If you have 2GB of RAM, you can still get some decent performance out of VS2005. But hard disk matters alot.
http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/11/01/tip-trick-hard-drive-speed-and-visual-studio-performance.aspxhttp://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2006/09/22/Tip_2F00_Trick_3A00_-Optimizing-ASP.NET-2.0-Web-Project-Build-Performance-with-VS-2005.aspx
You should be applying VS2005 SP1 regardless. And using Database Professional edition if you have it. And Web Deployment Projects. I cannot do work without those anymore. :-)
The melody of logic will always play out the truth. ~ Narumi Ayumu, Spiral
Hi Icelava,
Thanks for the tip. The article really helps. I will try to find a suitable PC configuration for VS2005.
Hannes:
Is VS2008 good? I am afraid of it being like VS2005 again and having it running excrutiating slow.
I had the same negative perception about VS 2005 until i customized the IDE. If you follow instructions on the links provided by icelava
You will notice that things like compile time is faster just like on VS 2005. Your machine has good specs infact 2GB is too way much for VS2005.
Also look at the new features of VS2005 such as Master Pages,WebParts and Navigation Controls, the new databinding is quite cool.. before you decide to go back to VS 2003
Thank you!
http://devpinoy.org/blogs/cruizer
bobo333:Your machine has good specs infact 2GB is too way much for VS2005.
I cannot really picture any scenario where there can be too much RAM......
Hi,
I have bought and am using VS2005. I am now just doing some proof-of-concept and playing around with web projects.
And I remembered what was the problem I faced back then - Memory Leak causing VS2005 to crash or IDE to become very slow.
The VS2005 seems to have a memory leak? Upon opening my poc solution, the RAM usage steadily climbed to over 200MB! And I only had 1 web project (arn 5-6 aspx files), and 2 class libraries (totalling not more than 10 files)
In the past, I had a solution with nearing 100 files. And the RAM usage shot up >1GB just by opening VS2005 and loading my project. It caused the VS2005 to crash and typing in VS2005 crawled to a halt! (yes just typing in the editor was very slow! It took my 1 minute to type the syntax "DataSet dsTemp = new DataSet();"!!!)
Does any1 know of any solutions? I have already installed SP1 and follow the steps in scott's blog. Still no avail.
Maybe you'd want to reinstall a clean OS instead. Sometimes certain things are caused by the OS or hardware platform.
Like my first-issued laptop, would occassionally spin the CPU 100% in Visual Studio, and upon killing devenv.exe, another process would be passed the baton to burn the CPU to ashes. The cycle would carry on until there are no processes left to kill a.k.a. system restart. Reinstalling Windows XP did not help. It was only by upgrading to Windows Vista did I finally eradicate the problem. Although the machine runs like a snail now.
Otherwise medium to large-size solutions consume 200-400MB on my machines. I have seen crashes by other problems, like the SSIS editor, or Database Professional edition schema compares with a CLR assembly, but not observed memory leaks of such manner.
I don't think a clean OS will help. I had tried that before. Basically, the PC had only the following software
Windows XP with IIS 6? Nice hack there ;-)
It will be interesting to note your exact usage pattern with Visual Studio because we don't experience any severe memory leaks like you mention. The highest memory consumption came from the SSIS graphical editor struggling to build a hierarchy of objects from the unreadable mesh of XML when we had way too many parallel data-processing pipelines.
Ha sorry. Mistake. IIS 5.1
Anyways, I did a google on "VS2005 memory leaks" and some pages came out.
http://www.lazycoder.com/weblog/index.php/archives/2005/12/27/visual-studio-2005-memory-leak/http://www.tapmymind.com/blog/tap_my_mind/archive/2007/05/08/how-i-got-vs-2005-to-leak-up-to-1gb-of-my-ram.aspx
The funny thing is I experienced this (in fact my whole dev team experienced it) back in 2006. The memory just shoots up very quickly and crashes the IDE. But there are ppl who doesn't experience this, like yourself. There must be some settings that's causing it on my PC. Really need to know what it is. I can't work with an IDE that requires 5 seconds to type 1 character! Help!
Something new to report.
I had left my VS2005 running. With just 3 projects opened, not totalling to more than 15 files, the memory consumption went up to 240MB.
I just left it there, and did not touch it, whilst continuing work with SQL2005, firefox and excel. Suddenly, the memory consumption dropped to 31MB
So I tried fixing some errors here and there and rebuilding it (did this no more than 7times). It shot up to 135MB. And what I did was only to comment out those lines that have errors. And then did a "Build Website".
Visual Studio takes up heck alot of memory to build the hierarchy of Intellisense entries that can be used by your projects. What you have described is actually normal behaviour. You should be worried when it eats up close to 1GB and refuses to let go.
Usually the biggest culprits are add-ons and plug-ins - all those "nice" extras - that other 3rd-party developers/vendors provide. Every additional menu item, new designer interface, new images, new project types, new workflows, etc. My Visual Studios are never the stock installation composition. There are just many other components we need to install before Visual Studio even becomes useful for our purposes.
However, your case is a simple installation already poses a problem. Does your development team happen to all possess the same hardware configuration for their development workstations? Do you observe bad memory leaks to all different types of machines?