VS.Net is slow for web development

[Shaji]

Dear All,



I am using VS.Net (and most of you, of course) for a quite long period for
web development for medium to large development tasks. My humble opinion is
vs.net is eating up a lot of developer time, as far as the web development
is concerned.



Edit,Compile,Debug, then fix errors, then Edit , Compile....



This process is painfully slow, and most of the time developers are simply
waiting for vs.net to open the browser and to hit the breakpoint, some time
it took nearly 1 min (may be I am exaggerating, but even 15 seconds is a
pain). Initially I thought that it is problem with the performance of my
machine, but later I found that it is not the case. All of the developers I
dealt with shared the same opinion (including some MS consultants). Usually
this performance issues come into discussion when we gather around a single
machine to resolve some complex issues....then while running the project
every body start to comment like ...



Developer 1: "Hey why is it so slow....?"

Developer 2:"I also have the same performance issues... I thought that it is
only for my machine"



......then they start to have a look on the resources of the pc; but will
find that it is good if not excellent.

......then will try to see the task manager to see who is eating up the
resources and it will be devenv.exe, vbc.exe/csc.exe



This drama continues all the time...

Performance is okay for debugging windows apps, but not for web apps. It
might be because Vs.net needs to integrate the debugger with an external
browser. But any way , it is causing a huge productivity loose.


Shaji.

 

[Carl Prothman [MVP]]

I am using VS.Net (and most of you, of course) for a quite long period for
web development for medium to large development tasks. My humble opinion is
vs.net is eating up a lot of developer time, as far as the web development
is concerned.
Edit,Compile,Debug, then fix errors, then Edit , Compile....
This process is painfully slow, and most of the time developers are simply
waiting for vs.net to open the browser and to hit the breakpoint, some time
it took nearly 1 min (may be I am exaggerating, but even 15 seconds is a
pain).

Shaji,
How much memory and processor speed do you have on your dev boxes?

I have found that the more memory you have (500 MB or greater), the better
Visual Studio .NET performs! Of course having a faster processor helps
also. ;-) I have a P4 1.5 processor with 1 GB of memory...

You can also use the other dev method:
Edit -> Compile -> Refresh External Browser
Of course you can't step through your code this way (unless you attached
the debugger to the current running process), but this method speeds up the
edit / test cycle greatly! Especially for small UI changes.

--

Thanks,
Carl Prothman
Microsoft ASP.NET MVP

Hire top-notch developers at http://www.able-consulting.com

 

[Shaji]

Carl Prothman,
Thanks for your comments.
512 MB and p4 1.x is what I have. Yes Edit,Compile.Refresh IE is what we
follow...for minor bug fixing.

I would like to hear the comments of developers if they also have the same
frustration due to the performance of vs.net .

Shaji

 

[martin]

hi,

Could you please expand on the follwing statement

You can also use the other dev method:
Edit -> Compile -> Refresh External Browser
Of course you can't step through your code this way (unless you attached
the debugger to the current running process), but this method speeds up the
edit / test cycle greatly! Especially for small UI changes.

I can't see this in my edit menu or anywhere else for that matter

and it sounds like a feature I would use a lot.

cheers

martin.

 

[Colin Young]

I think that means edit your code, compile it, then go to your open browser
and refresh the page. 90% of what I do doesn't require stepping through the
code line-by line. The few times I do need to step through I don't mind
taking the extra hit of having to attach to a running process.

Colin

 

[Torben Frandsen]

I would like to hear the comments of developers if they also have the same
frustration due to the performance of vs.net .

Yes!

Another thing that has given us a good laugh here: At the Danish launch
event for VS2k3, some Microsoft official told the dumbstruck crowd that the
new IDE uses a "load-on-demand technology" which makes loading it incredibly
fast. I don't know about you, but on a 2.6GHz P4 with 1 GB of RAM, I don't
find 17 seconds "incredibly" fast. (And this is before loading any files.

Torben

 

[Carl Prothman [MVP]]

I think that means edit your code, compile it, then go to your open browser
and refresh the page.

Correct, that is what I meant.

90% of what I do doesn't require stepping through the
code line-by line. The few times I do need to step through I don't mind
taking the extra hit of having to attach to a running process.

Yup, I agree! ;-)

 

[Shaji]

I am not anti-vs.net....I love the tool ...but there are areas to be
improved.

I too agree that 90% (approx) of the time it doesn't require stepping thru
the code. Yes, the 10% requires. Or may be more depending on the complexity
and size of the application that you develop. Even if it is 10% (let me
stick to your calculation) , it is 1 day as far as a 10 day long development
task- (a small project) is concerned. If the vs.net irritates the developer
for that one day he need an additional day to finish the tasks for the other
day.... don't simply think that it is a matter of a day, it might even cause
major schedule slips, if you see the big picture.

Also programming is turned out to be a practice of "trail and error", no
body can be a master of anything. We never rewrite the things, the code we
once written will be reused.That means the things that we write now....is
always new stuff! Which definitely requires "step-thru" with an eagle eye.



Regards,

Shaji.

www.DotNetMe.com

 

[Marc]

I am using VS.Net (and most of you, of course) for a quite long period for

web development for medium to large development tasks. My humble opinion is
vs.net is eating up a lot of developer time, as far as the web development
is concerned.

I agree with that.

Web development with vs6 and vb was much faster. Hit run and
everything appears instantly. Obviously this is due to the
interpretted nature of the work as opposed to the dot net compilation
and loading of dlls into memory.

My team would love the option to be able to run web apps in a dev
interpretted mode, then compile when we're ready to release.

Web development in vs.net is incredibly slow, but running multiple
compiles during development is a pain on any project. An interpretted
option would greatly improve development time on all projects.

Just my 2p.

 

[Alvin Bruney]

You are better off forgetting this idea. It won't happen. The movement is
away from code interpretation for obvious reasons.

 

[mikemurf22]

I had a similar problem. I had about 30 breakpoints. Once I got that
number down to about 5 its started working fine again.

 

[Marc]

I had a similar problem. I had about 30 breakpoints. Once I got that
number down to about 5 its started working fine again.

The various watch windows can really slow things down when stepping through code