6 ms·

Improved Overall Visual Studio “15” Responsiveness

47 points by dustinmoris 10y ago

johnhattan 10y ago
Have they hinted at a release date? I'd love a snappier VS, but I don't want pre-release stuff in my build chain.
- Kipters 10y ago
  They announced an event on November 25th, named "Connect();". Last year at Connect(); they announced the release of Visual Studio Code 1.0, so maybe there's a chance we'll know more that day
  - LyalinDotCom 10y ago
    We're excited about the fall developer event for sure and do hope folks tune in online (as its mostly a virtual and free event). Save the date for Connect(); // 2016 is here: https://connectevent.microsoft.com/ https://connectevent.microsoft.com/ Nov 16th through 18th But to be fair here we have not communicated on what we plan to announce at this event but certainly there will be lots of news!
    - Kipters 10y ago
      I'm sorry, I mixed the date with the Surface event :D
Analemma_ 10y ago
I recently tried disabling Resharper, after many years of use, figuring that Roslyn and the other improvements in VS made it unnecessary. And they mostly do, but there are a couple sticking points. Opening a file with Ctrl+, is very slow: often one character per second or worse. Sometimes the dialog box crashes, and occasionally Ctrl+, crashes VS entirely. Meanwhile the equivalent shortcut in Resharper (Ctrl+Shift+T) always worked flawlessly. So it still seems like there's a lot of progress to be made here. If anyone on that perf opt team is reading this, please take a look at Ctrl+, - it's ridiculous that Resharper's identical command works so much better.
- LyalinDotCom 10y ago
  If you have the time we'd love to hear your feedback via our built-in feedback mechanism, see link below for details in case you're not familiar. https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt632287.aspx https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt632287.aspx Thanks for testing the preview, we are doing everything we can to improve the core IDE capabilities in this release.
  - jasonkostempski 10y ago
    I have feedback on all MS feedback tools. Please stop making them top-level controls that can't be removed. No one has ever needed to get to the feedback feature so urgently that it warrants a permanent place on the screen. VSCode is the worst offender. It's an unprofessional looking smiley face and the only option is to tweet or open an issue on GitHub. Not everyone has account at those places and leaving feedback shouldn't require an account unless you only want to hear from people within your reality bubble.
    - matt4077 10y ago
      Are you really ranting about a 15x15px icon in the far corner (It took me about two minutes to find) of a free & open & rather good editor?
      - BoorishBears 10y ago
        The rant is totally unwarranted but I do sometimes wish the smiley was something more subdued
    - stuartd 10y ago
      The smiley used to be in Visual Studio http://stackoverflow.com/questions/31532267/can-i-hide-the-smiley-in-visual-studio-2015-final http://stackoverflow.com/questions/31532267/can-i-hide-the-s...
- int_19h 10y ago
  > Opening a file with Ctrl+, is very slow: often one character per second or worse. Sometimes the dialog box crashes, and occasionally Ctrl+, crashes VS entirely. Do you have any other extensions installed? This particular thing in VS is an extensibility point, and any extension can offer its own provider, that will be queried when you type things. So it only takes one poorly written extension to slow things down significantly.
sakopov 10y ago
Is Visual Studio "15" the next major release of Visual Studio or the next service pack for Visual Studio 2015? These product names are confusing to say the least. Regardless, i'm happy to see performance upgrades. However, I feel like a lot of performance issues I have with VS have to do with ReSharper running tasks in background, not so much VS itself.
- sitharus 10y ago
  The next major release, 15 is the version number. Visual studio 2015 is version 14, so '15' will probably be vs 2017, unless the marketing department change their minds again.
  - oneplane 10y ago
    Why is it so hard for some companies to use logical succession numbers. Just assign 1 number, and then keep incrementing it, the same way each time. It's not even about semantic version numbering, but just pure use of logical numbers. So far, they screwed up with practically everything they make...
    - kyriakos 10y ago
      Marketing really even though it's completely unnecessary in this case.
    - 0xffff2 10y ago
      They do? For quite a while now, MS has referred to pre-release versions of Visual Studio by incremented version number and post-release versions by year released.
      - oneplane 10y ago
        If you re-read your comment, does the 'pre-release' and 'post-release' thing not ring a bell? Also, it seems that the only real ID on what software you have seems to be the build number, and not even that makes sense.
ed_blackburn 10y ago
Seems a shame the "15" team have given up on libgit2. Considering Microsoft have / are a contributor _and_ presumably all contributing parties have the same goal (cross platform, feature parity etc) one has to wonder what's so bad with libgit2 it's been dropped in favour of shelling out to git.exe?
- Osiris 10y ago
  Seriously. Git for Windows is frustratingly slow in my experience. I've been waiting for a good fit client on Windows that leverages libgit2 for performance, but I'm not aware of any.
  - james-skemp 10y ago
    I don't know that it leverages libgit2, but SourceTree is something we use and while I was initially unsure, it and PowerShell are my preferred ways of working with git. (I maybe use VS's git integration once a week or so.)
- treebeard901 10y ago
  It's likely a problem with Visual Studio being a 32-bit application and less to do with git. This is why they referenced running git out of process to save a few hundred megabytes of memory.
  - ethomson 10y ago
    Yes, this is exactly it. Calling git as a separate process clears up the cost of libgit2. And not just one copy of the library, since there are so many users of git within Visual Studio (Team Explorer, GitHub, CodeLens...) there are at least two copies of the library being loaded. (GitHub ships a newer version of libgit2 in VS prior to 15, intentionally. The Microsoft teams should use a single version, the one included with Team Explorer, but communication is hard.) By dropping libgit2, they freed up some memory. Obviously the overall memory usage of VS and `git` is probably _increased_ but VS teams are flogged until memory usage decreases because nobody will prioritize making it a 64 bit app. (Opposite, in fact: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/ricom/2009/06/10/visual-studio-why-is-there-no-64-bit-version-yet/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/ricom/2009/06/10/visual-stu...) There's also the issue that Microsoft hired the maintainer of Git for Windows and lost a maintainer of libgit2. It's not an ideal situation for libgit2, we certainly liked our relationship with the VS team, but we understand and sympathize with their decision.
mcarlise2 10y ago
From sources in the know: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/visualstudio/2016/10/05/join-us-in-november-for-connect-2016/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/visualstudio/2016/10/05/joi... Microsoft is going to announce the GA (General Availability) Visual Studio 2016, Team Foundation Server 2016, and Visual Studio Code 2.0 at this connect event in November. Big news for sure…the real question is now that Microsoft is on annual release cadences for their developer tools…will the rapid release cycle move the needle for developers or just cause added frustration…
sogen 10y ago
Baffled that the install takes Hours, for me it took about 5 hours to install VSCE, and had lots of problems. Read for someone it took 24 hours
criddell 10y ago
I hope edit-and-continue gets fixed.
blinkingled 10y ago
No IDE will ever be as responsive as VC++ 6.0. That thing was a pleasure.

47 points by dustinmoris 10y ago

johnhattan 10y ago

Have they hinted at a release date? I'd love a snappier VS, but I don't want pre-release stuff in my build chain.

Kipters 10y ago
They announced an event on November 25th, named "Connect();". Last year at Connect(); they announced the release of Visual Studio Code 1.0, so maybe there's a chance we'll know more that day
- LyalinDotCom 10y ago
  We're excited about the fall developer event for sure and do hope folks tune in online (as its mostly a virtual and free event). Save the date for Connect(); // 2016 is here: https://connectevent.microsoft.com/ https://connectevent.microsoft.com/ Nov 16th through 18th But to be fair here we have not communicated on what we plan to announce at this event but certainly there will be lots of news!
  - Kipters 10y ago
    I'm sorry, I mixed the date with the Surface event :D

Analemma_ 10y ago

I recently tried disabling Resharper, after many years of use, figuring that Roslyn and the other improvements in VS made it unnecessary. And they mostly do, but there are a couple sticking points. Opening a file with Ctrl+, is very slow: often one character per second or worse. Sometimes the dialog box crashes, and occasionally Ctrl+, crashes VS entirely. Meanwhile the equivalent shortcut in Resharper (Ctrl+Shift+T) always worked flawlessly. So it still seems like there's a lot of progress to be made here. If anyone on that perf opt team is reading this, please take a look at Ctrl+, - it's ridiculous that Resharper's identical command works so much better.

LyalinDotCom 10y ago
If you have the time we'd love to hear your feedback via our built-in feedback mechanism, see link below for details in case you're not familiar. https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt632287.aspx https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt632287.aspx Thanks for testing the preview, we are doing everything we can to improve the core IDE capabilities in this release.
- jasonkostempski 10y ago
  I have feedback on all MS feedback tools. Please stop making them top-level controls that can't be removed. No one has ever needed to get to the feedback feature so urgently that it warrants a permanent place on the screen. VSCode is the worst offender. It's an unprofessional looking smiley face and the only option is to tweet or open an issue on GitHub. Not everyone has account at those places and leaving feedback shouldn't require an account unless you only want to hear from people within your reality bubble.
  - matt4077 10y ago
    Are you really ranting about a 15x15px icon in the far corner (It took me about two minutes to find) of a free & open & rather good editor?
    - BoorishBears 10y ago
      The rant is totally unwarranted but I do sometimes wish the smiley was something more subdued
  - stuartd 10y ago
    The smiley used to be in Visual Studio http://stackoverflow.com/questions/31532267/can-i-hide-the-smiley-in-visual-studio-2015-final http://stackoverflow.com/questions/31532267/can-i-hide-the-s...
int_19h 10y ago
> Opening a file with Ctrl+, is very slow: often one character per second or worse. Sometimes the dialog box crashes, and occasionally Ctrl+, crashes VS entirely. Do you have any other extensions installed? This particular thing in VS is an extensibility point, and any extension can offer its own provider, that will be queried when you type things. So it only takes one poorly written extension to slow things down significantly.

sakopov 10y ago

Is Visual Studio "15" the next major release of Visual Studio or the next service pack for Visual Studio 2015? These product names are confusing to say the least. Regardless, i'm happy to see performance upgrades. However, I feel like a lot of performance issues I have with VS have to do with ReSharper running tasks in background, not so much VS itself.

sitharus 10y ago
The next major release, 15 is the version number. Visual studio 2015 is version 14, so '15' will probably be vs 2017, unless the marketing department change their minds again.
- oneplane 10y ago
  Why is it so hard for some companies to use logical succession numbers. Just assign 1 number, and then keep incrementing it, the same way each time. It's not even about semantic version numbering, but just pure use of logical numbers. So far, they screwed up with practically everything they make...
  - kyriakos 10y ago
    Marketing really even though it's completely unnecessary in this case.
  - 0xffff2 10y ago
    They do? For quite a while now, MS has referred to pre-release versions of Visual Studio by incremented version number and post-release versions by year released.
    - oneplane 10y ago
      If you re-read your comment, does the 'pre-release' and 'post-release' thing not ring a bell? Also, it seems that the only real ID on what software you have seems to be the build number, and not even that makes sense.

ed_blackburn 10y ago

Seems a shame the "15" team have given up on libgit2. Considering Microsoft have / are a contributor _and_ presumably all contributing parties have the same goal (cross platform, feature parity etc) one has to wonder what's so bad with libgit2 it's been dropped in favour of shelling out to git.exe?

Osiris 10y ago
Seriously. Git for Windows is frustratingly slow in my experience. I've been waiting for a good fit client on Windows that leverages libgit2 for performance, but I'm not aware of any.
- james-skemp 10y ago
  I don't know that it leverages libgit2, but SourceTree is something we use and while I was initially unsure, it and PowerShell are my preferred ways of working with git. (I maybe use VS's git integration once a week or so.)
treebeard901 10y ago
It's likely a problem with Visual Studio being a 32-bit application and less to do with git. This is why they referenced running git out of process to save a few hundred megabytes of memory.
- ethomson 10y ago
  Yes, this is exactly it. Calling git as a separate process clears up the cost of libgit2. And not just one copy of the library, since there are so many users of git within Visual Studio (Team Explorer, GitHub, CodeLens...) there are at least two copies of the library being loaded. (GitHub ships a newer version of libgit2 in VS prior to 15, intentionally. The Microsoft teams should use a single version, the one included with Team Explorer, but communication is hard.) By dropping libgit2, they freed up some memory. Obviously the overall memory usage of VS and `git` is probably _increased_ but VS teams are flogged until memory usage decreases because nobody will prioritize making it a 64 bit app. (Opposite, in fact: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/ricom/2009/06/10/visual-studio-why-is-there-no-64-bit-version-yet/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/ricom/2009/06/10/visual-stu...) There's also the issue that Microsoft hired the maintainer of Git for Windows and lost a maintainer of libgit2. It's not an ideal situation for libgit2, we certainly liked our relationship with the VS team, but we understand and sympathize with their decision.

mcarlise2 10y ago

From sources in the know: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/visualstudio/2016/10/05/join-us-in-november-for-connect-2016/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/visualstudio/2016/10/05/joi... Microsoft is going to announce the GA (General Availability) Visual Studio 2016, Team Foundation Server 2016, and Visual Studio Code 2.0 at this connect event in November. Big news for sure…the real question is now that Microsoft is on annual release cadences for their developer tools…will the rapid release cycle move the needle for developers or just cause added frustration…

sogen 10y ago

Baffled that the install takes Hours, for me it took about 5 hours to install VSCE, and had lots of problems. Read for someone it took 24 hours

criddell 10y ago

I hope edit-and-continue gets fixed.

blinkingled 10y ago

No IDE will ever be as responsive as VC++ 6.0. That thing was a pleasure.