Lately I notice that every time I insert a DoK or a disk, the AutoPlay/autorun doesn't appear. I also notice that when I click on the disk drive in My Computer window, I will get directed to the explorer view of the disk and the autorun doesn't engaged. It is especially annoying when I insert a disk for some installation and I have to search for the setup.exe file…
After googling for a while I found this article:
Apparently, some programs you install decides to disable the autoplay option. VMWare was the cause in my computer.
After running all the steps described in the article, all came back to normal…
About two months ago, we upgraded our projects to Visual Studio 2010. Since then the developers started to complain that the performance of the IDE has degraded in comparison to VS2008. From build times that doubled to stalling in the editor when you code. Other teams in our department started to complain as well.
So we started to find the problem. We investigated three direction:
- Solution maintenance
- Visual studio
- Hardware
Solution maintenance:
This is a key issue. In my previous experience we found that solutions that are not maintained properly are doomed to cause trouble.
This relates mostly to build time, but it can also effect the IDE because, as you know, visual studio and add-ins like resharper are constantly compiling your new code in the background.
I started by changing the build output verbosity:
. I also found that the resolving references stage is quite long and I have to many projects with unneeded references. So the conclusions are:
- Minimize the number of projects in the solution: I found that each project builds in about 2-4 seconds (Silverlight project takes about 9 seconds), but the transition between the projects takes a lot of time. When you have a large number of projects, this has a drastic effect on the build time. So try to merge projects. For example: projects that have a few classes and use folders and namespaces. Merge all the integration tests into one projects (also make it easy to manage the integration tests in the CI server).
- Remove redundant references from projects: I also found that the resolving references stage is quite long and I have to many projects with unneeded references. I used resharper in order to find dependent code in a project and deleted the references which didn’t have dependent code.
- Do not build setup/deploy projects in debug mode: Setup projects and web deployment projects takes a long time to build. Make sure that in debug build configuration (Build –> Build Configurations) setup and web deployment projects are not marked for build.
Visual Studio:
- Patches: Since the release of Visual Studio 2010, Microsoft released a couple of patches to fix known issues:
I recommend to all of you to subscribe to the Visual Studio blog or to Scott Guthrie’s blog for the latest’s updates to visual studio.
- Windows Automation UI: Another important issue is Window Automation UI. Microsoft recommend to install it if you are running on windows xp. You also could notice the visual studio icon that appears on your system tray, which shows this recommendation. In short, when installed it is suppose to make visual studio to run faster
- Diagnostics: Our contact in Microsoft support, recommended us to install the Visual Studio Diagnostics Tool. This tool is used for collecting trace information on visual studio performance. This logs can be analyzed independently or can be sent to Microsoft Support. I haven't had a chance to install it yet. I will update on this soon.
- Add-ins and extensions: As you probably know, visual studio 2010 with the Visual Studio Gallery allows you to install a lot of add ins and extensions to visual studio. In lot of cases one or more of these can have drastic effect on performance. It is recommended to run Visual Studio in safe mode by running with with the safe mode switch:
Then you can see any performance improvement. If so, try to activate the add ins and extensions one by one and diagnose which one causes the performance impact.
Hardware:
- Defragmentation: fragmented disk cause slower build times (which as mentioned can also effect IDE general performance). In my team, we found that the image which is used to install windows on the dev machines was seriously fragmented. After defrag build time decreased by half!! It is a know windows performance issue, so every once in a while remember to do a scan disk and defrag your drives.
- Maintain your machine: Cleanup your machine every once in a while. I use CCleaner to clean up the drives and registry and it works great.
- DirectX: There are some articles on the web which indicates that visual studio doesn’t run well on machines without a graphic card that supports DirectX 9. This is due to the new UI which is build on WPF. Our dev machines doesn’t have graphic card slots so I couldn’t check it. If you have a chance, I recommend you try, and comment on your results. In my home computer which have a pretty massive graphic card Visual Studio works well, but I don’t have solutions with 30+ projects…
- Hardware acceleration: Visual Studio uses hardware accelerations (as mentioned). You can try to disable it, for better performance:
Our machines doesn’t have graphic acceleration, so we tried this and performance got better, most of the times.
If you have any more tips and tricks about this issue, please share it with us.
Hope this helps