Visual Studio 2010 has not made a good first impression.
It took about a day to install. I was using the Visual Studio Ultimate Web Installer and much of the time was spent downloading bits. I’m sure it would have been faster had I started with a DVD. Also, I wasn’t giving the install my full attention. I was doing my regular work on one machine while installing VS 2010 on a remote machine. I would connect to the remote machine now and then to check on the progress. I don’t know exactly how long it took, but it was the majority of a day.
When I first started Visual Studio 2010, it took about half an hour to write my first “hello world” example. When I fired up VS 2010, I spent several minutes staring at a dialog that said “Microsoft Visual Studio is loading user settings. This may take a few minutes.” Seven minutes after launching Visual Studio, the application went away and my machine rebooted. I started Visual Studio again, started a C# console application, inserted a WriteLine statement, and compiled. Total elapsed time: 27 minutes.
I closed Visual Studio and did some more work. Later I came back and opened Visual Studio to write “hello world” again. Time from starting Visual Studio to compiling: 2 minutes 50 seconds.
Now I realize that start-up time isn’t everything. Most users will start Visual Studio and keep it up for hours or days. And that’s who Visual Studio is intended to serve. It’s not meant to be something you fire up for quick jobs.
Visual Studio 2010 is huge. The installation DVD is 2.3 GB. The source code for VS 2010 contains about 1,500,000 files and takes Microsoft 61 hours to build according to Phil Haack. (He said he didn’t know how many machines the build process uses.) Phil Haack also said that the release of VS 2010 was delayed because the feedback from testers was that the product was too slow. If the released product is faster, the betas must have been intolerably slow.
Update: I installed the Express version of VS 2010 on another computer and have been using it regularly. It is much faster, and pleasant to use. Maybe there’s something about the Ultimate edition (TFS integration?) that slows it down.
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