WF 3.0/3.5 Design Time Performance Boost

Kushal Shah, from the WF designer team at Microsoft, has recently posted a series of posts on WF 3.0/3.5 design time performance. As some of you might know, the WF 3.0/3.5 designer’s performance decreases drastically as the number of activities in the WF rises and Kushal addresses this exact issue with some tips & tricks (Part I & Part II).

Tips & tricks are nice, but part III of Kushal’s posts really got me going. Besides the fact that work has been done to improve WF 3.0/3.5 designer performance under VS2010 (remember that WF 3.0/3.5 still ships in VS2010 side-by-side with WF 4.0), Microsoft has released two hotfixes which apply these fixes onto VS2008 SP1.

Thus, even if you are using WF 3.0/3.5 and are unable to upgrade to VS2010 for some reason – go ahead and try the hotfixes (here and here). They just might make your experience a little better!