I'm running Visual Studio 2013 Pro (RTM version) on my formatted PC (Windows 8.1 fresh install).
I don't know why, but Visual Studio 2013 Pro is very very slow! Slow for building, debugging, navigating in the IDE... my hard disk drive LED is not lighting up at all!
I'm on a little MFC (C++) project using the Boost library.
Any ideas?
It is something concerned with the graphics drivers. If you update them you will be fine.
Or you can disable the hardware graphics acceleration in Visual Studio according to these steps:
In Visual Studio, click "Tools", and then click "Options".
In the Options dialog box, navigate to the "Environment > General" section and clear the "Automatically adjust visual experience based on client performance" check box. (Refer to the following screen shot for this step.)
Clear the "Use hardware graphics acceleration if available" check box to prevent the use of hardware graphics acceleration.
Select or clear the "Enable rich client visual experience" check box to make sure that rich visuals are always on or off, respectively. When this check box is selected, rich visuals are used independent of the computer environment. For example, rich visuals are used when you run Visual Studio locally on a rich client and over remote desktop.
References:
You experience performance issues, product crashes, or rendering issues in Visual Studio 2013
Try to set Current source control plug-in to None (menu Tools → Options → Source Control), if you are using the Microsoft Git provider, which seems to slow Visual Studio 2013 down more and more the larger the repository gets.
I had the whole Dojo Toolkit framework under source control using the Microsoft Git provider, and it got to the point where there were delays from the time I hit a key to the time the glyph would appear on the screen. That bad.
When/if you need Git again, you can switch to the TortoiseGit provider or Git-Extensions, both will work without slowdown. I like Git-Extensions, personally.
I too have struggled a bit with bad performance in Visual Studio 2013 (Premium). Pretty much the same issues as TS had. Slow navigation, scrolling, building... just about everything. Luckily I have manage to solve my own problem by disabling Synchronized Settings in Visual Studio.
Go to menu Tools → Options → Environment-Synchronized Settings and remove this option by unchecking the checkbox.
In the case of web applications, another cause of slow building and debugging (but not IDE navigation) could be the Browser Link feature.
I found that with this switched on, building would take 4 times longer and debugging was painful - after every postback, web pages would freeze for a few seconds before you could interact with them.
I was using a solution upgraded from Visual Studio 2012. Visual Studio 2013 also upgraded the .suo file. Deleting the solution's .suo file (it's next to the .sln file), closing and re-opening Visual Studio fixed the problem for me. My .suo file went from 91KB to 27KB.
I had the same problem and the only solution that worked for me was to follow the three steps presented below:
Clean the WebSiteCache folder (you may find it at
C:\Users\%USERNAME%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\WebSiteCache)
Clean the "Temporary ASP.NET Files" folder (find it at
C:\Users\%USERNAME%\AppData\Local\Temp\Temporary ASP.NET Files)
Restart Visual Studio
What fixed it for me was disabling Git by setting Current source control plug-in to None in Visual Studio, menu Options → Source Control:
This issue seems to be because of uninstalling the SQL Server Compact edition (4.0).
I was having this issue, and it got fixed after installing the SQL Server Compact edition 4.0.
On closing Visual Studio 2013, I was getting a message to install SQL Server Compact edition as a C++ project needed some thing... can't put finger on anything.
Resolve this issue by installing Microsoft SQL Server Compact 4.0
Microsoft SQL Server Compact 4.0
I can advise an option like this.
CodeLens can be disabled like as at the picture. It gives a lot of performance goodness.
If you are debugging an ASP.NET website using Internet Explorer 10 (and later), make sure to turn off your Internet Explorer 'LastPass' password manager plugin. LastPass will bring your debugging sessions to a crawl and significantly reduce your capacity for patience!
I submitted a support ticket to Lastpass about this and they acknowledged the issue without any intention to fix it, merely saying: "LastPass is not compatible with Visual Studio 2013".
I had the same problem and all the solutions mentioned here didn't work out for me.
After uninstalling the "Productivity Power Tools 2013" extension, the performance was back to normal.
One more thing to check; for me it was Fusion logging.
I'd turned this on a very long time ago and more or less forgotten about it. Getting rid of the 5000+ directories and 1 GB of logged files worked wonders.
There is a good workaround for this solution if you are experiencing slowness in rendering the .cs files and .cshtml files.
Just close all the files opened so that the cache gets cleared and open the required files again.
Visual Studio Community Edition was slow switching between files or opening new files. Everything else (for example, menu items) was otherwise normal.
I tried all the suggestions in the previous answers first and none worked. I then noticed it was occurring only on an ASP.NET MVC 4 Web Application, so I added a new ASP.NET MVC 4 Web Application, and this was fast.
After much trial and error, I discovered the difference was packages.config - If I put the Microsoft references at the top of the file this made everything snappy again.
Move the Microsoft* entries to the top.
It appears you don’t need to move them all - moving say <package id="Microsoft.Web.Infrastructure" has an noticeable effect on my machine.
As an aside
Removing all contents of the file makes it another notch faster too*
Excluding packages.config from Visual Studio does not fix the issue
A friend using Visual Studio 2013 Premium noticed no difference in either of these cases (both were fast)
UPDATE
It appears missing or incomplete NuGet packages locally are the cause. I opened the Package manager and got a warning 'Some NuGet packages are missing from this solution' and choose to Restore them and this sped things up. However I don’t like this as in my repository I only add the actual items required for compilation as I don’t want to bloat my repository, so in the end I just removed the packages.config.
This solution may not suit your needs as I prefer to use NuGet to fetch the packages, not handle updates to packages, so this will break this if you use it for that purpose.
For me, the problem was the Start page -- it was downloading content and causing Visual Studio to hang.
The only solution for me was to:
Kill the DevEnv process from Task Manager
Start Visual Studio in Safe Mode from the command line:devenv.exe /safemode
Go to menu Tools → Options, and select the Environment/Startup options
Choose "Show empty environment" for the startup action
Close Visual Studio
Restart normally
Running unit tests was slow. It was a ReSharper issue.
Menu ReSharper → Options → Environment → General ... Clear Caches
Menu Tools → Options → ReSharper → General ... Suspend Now
Close Visual Studio
Delete the .suo file.
Open Visual Studio again.
Re-enable ReSharper.
I also had an issue with a slow IDE.
In my case I installed
ReSharper
Npgsql (low chance to cause the problem)
Entity Framework Power Tools Beta 4
The following helped me a bit:
Disabled synchronization - menu Tools → Options → Environment-Synchronized Settings
Disabled plug-in selection - menu Tools → Studio → Options → Source Control.
Disabled Entity Framework Power Tools Beta 4 - menu Tools → Extensions and Updates
Uninstalled JetBrain's Resharper - WOW!! I am fast again!!
Change the Fusion Log Value to 0. It solved my issue.
This is the FusionLog key in the registry:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Fusion
Check ForceLog value (1 enabled, 0 disabled).
I was also facing this issue for quite long time. Below are the steps that I perform, and it works for me always:
Deleting the solution's .suo file.
Deleting the Temporary ASP.NET Files (You can find it at find it at %WINDOW%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\Temporary ASP.NET Files)
Deleting all breakpoints in the application.
Visual Studio 2013 has a package server running, and it was spending up to 2 million K of memory.
I put it to low priority and affinity with only one CPU, and Visual Studio ran much more smoothly.
Performance Explorer
Have you been using menu Analyze → Performance and Diagnostics? I have! It's awesome! But you may want to clean up.
Open the Performance Explorer. If you collapse all of the items in there, select all, then you can right click and do Delete.
My solution opens faster and is in general running much faster now.
Also you may notice changes to your sln file as shown. For me, this section was deleted from the sln.
GlobalSection(Performance) = preSolution
HasPerformanceSessions = true
EndGlobalSection
In Visual Studio 2015 Community edition, I've experienced a very (very) slow IDE after changing the "Environment Font" on menu Tools → Options... → Fonts and Colors.
Reverting this options back to the default value ("automatic") solved it immediately.
I had similar problems when moving from Visual Studio 2012 → Visual Studio 2013. The IDE would lock up after almost every click or save, and building would take several times longer. None of the solutions listed here helped.
What finally did help was moving my projects to a local drive. Visual Studio 2012 had no problems storing my projects on a network share, but Visual Studio 2013 for some reason couldn't handle it.
I had a Visual Studio 2013 installed, and it was running smoothly. At some point it started to get sluggish and decided to install Visual Studio 2015. After install, nothing changed and both versions were building the solution very slow (around 10 minutes for 18 projects in solution).
Then I have started thinking of recently installed extensions - the most recent installed was PHP tools for Visual Studio (had it on Visual Studio 2013 only). I am not sure how can an extension affect other versions of Visual Studio, but uninstalling it helped me to solve the problem.
I hope this will help others to realize that it is not always Visual Studio's fault.
I added "devenv.exe" as an exclusion to Windows Defender. This solved my problem completely. People can try this as their first try.
I have the same problem, but it just gets slow when trying to stop debugging in Visual Studio 2013, and I try this:
Close Visual Studio, then
Find the work project folder
Delete .suo file
Delete /obj folder
Open Visual Studio
Rebuild
None of the suggestions worked for me, but I did solve my problem. I had tried most of the other recommendations before coming to the following solution.
My Scenario/Problem:
Using Visual Studio 2017 with ReSharper Ultimate. Keyboard input in the IDE got super slow as others have described. The last change I made to my solution was to add a new web site project, so I looked into that. After trying a lot of things, I tried adding a second web site project, so I could try to replace the first one, and Visual Studio just tanked after that. It wouldn't even load the solution anymore.
My Solution:
I forced Visual Studio closed and then I removed the newly added web site project(s) from the .sln file using Notepad. After saving and starting Visual Studio, my solution loaded quickly and everything seemed to be back to normal. I added a new Web Site with a slightly different configuration (see the thinking below), and the problem did not present itself again.
My Thinking:
I think the problem stemmed from creating the new web site project and using a file system path to a network share that is hosted in Azure. I'm working over VPN which tends to slow things down, and I occasionally experience various routing problems with some services, so my problem/solution might be a bit of a snowflake. I changed the file system path to be a local repository and will publish the files as needed which seems like a much better way to go.
I had a Visual Studio behavior where the typing was slow for my HTML files. Previously when I installed, I guessed that because my HTML files were generic HTML that the need to install any web development tools from the workload component of the installer was unnecessary. I went back and installed this bit and Visual Studio behavior became as I expected it.
This already has a bunch of answers here, but a general way to easily boost Visual Studio is to clear your temp files.
Press the Windows Key and R, and enter 'temp'. Press enter, and provide any administrator permission if you need to. Then press Control A to select all, and hit the Del key. Remember to provide any administrator permissions, and if 'the item is already in use' then just press skip.
After this, Press Windows Key and R again, but this time type '%temp%'. Repeat the previous steps in the new directory.
Finally, empty the recycle bin.
This might not help a ton, but it should boost general performance.
Related
ISSUE
While in VS, right-clicking on a file and selecting "Compare" will completely lock up Visual Studio.
The same happens when right-clicking inside the text-area of a file and doing a Compare.
The same happens regardless of file type... I've tried with .js .vb .cs .ascx .css
Attempting to click anything in the UI, including the minimize or close buttons, does absolutely nothing. The buttons don't even highlight to show hover / focus. The only way to close VS is through Task Manager.
Other staff with the same spec laptop as me, same version of programs, and same VS solution... are able to Compare just fine.
SPECS
Visual Studio 2017 Enterprise
Team Foundation Server 2015
Windows 10 Enterprise
16 GB RAM / i7 1.99 GHz processor
TROUBLESHOOTING
I've seen some suggestions of disabling "Identify Helpful Extensions" in Options => Text Editor => HTML => Advanced. No change.
I've restarted the Windows server that TFS is hosted on.
No events are logged in Event Viewer Application or System.
ADDITIONAL NOTES
With a solution already open, VS is currently consuming 0 CPU and between 220 MB and 240 MB of memory. When I attempt to Compare a file with TFS, and TFS immediately becomes frozen, the Memory remains mostly stagnant. Occasionally going up or down a few MB over the course of minutes.
Other staff with the same spec laptop as me, same version of programs,
and same VS solution... are able to Compare just fine.
This should be a client side issue, first try to clear TFS and VS cache.
For TFS2015 Clear TFS caches %LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\Team Foundation\6.0\Cache
Beside, you could also be able to change the Default Visual Studio Diff Tool . This will narrow down if the freezes visual studio issue is related to build-in compare tool.
How to change, the detail step please refer this blog. If clear cache not work and other tool works well, suggest you re-install your Visual Studio.
You can try closing Visual Studio and deleting %userprofile%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Team Foundation\x.0\Cache and /or %userprofile%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\VisualStudio\xx.0 directories and/or opening Developer Command prompt and running devenv.exe /resetSettings and/or deleting HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\15.0 registry entry (of course, it may be a good idea to back up registry entry prior to deletion)
As others have suggested clearing the TFS and VS cache may fix the problem but doing so may have some negative side effects.
Before attempting a full TFS and VS cache clear you can clear the folder located at C:\Users{Username}\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Team Foundation{Version}\Cache
This may limit undesired side effects.
See:
Visual Studio 2013 and TFS - All excluded changes being included back automatically
Using VS 2013 Community Edition (yay!), whenever I start it it opens the Performance Explorer window, which I do not require. I opened it once, and it seems to have saved this layout as default.
I have tried saving the setup without that window, locally overwriting the "CurrentSettings.vssettings", and if I expicitly reload the settings from there it is correct; however, if I close VS and open it again with a solution - Performance Explorer is back again.
Any ideas how/where to save my default settings?? Thanks!
This bug appears to have existed for sometime, across many different versions (read comments)
https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/749636/performance-explorer-window-is-always-opened-when-vs-is-started-and-mr-soln-opens
Phill's link shows the Microsoft Bug, but you can get around this issue.
Go to the Visual Studio Project's folder
Close Visual Studio!!!
Remove the following file types: Performance Reports *.vsp and Performance Sessions *.psess
Re-open the Solution, you'll get an error saying Visual Studio could not find the Performance Reports for the Project. Do not worry; the Solution will still load.
Close the solution.
Re-open the solution - the Performance Explorer tab will be finally gone!
CodeLens stopped working for some reason in project solution that I'm dealing nowadays. It is not showing references instead "- references". However, when I open up Visual Studio with another project It works like charm.I can confirm that CodeLens is enabled. Do you have any idea to make it work?
My Solution:
Toggle the CodeLens feature off and then on again.
Note: Many have found the feature to be turned off after an update so you just need to turn it back on. Thanks to #razblack for calling this out. Don't forget to give his comment an upvote if this was your issue!
Go into Tools -> Options... -> Text Editor -> All Languages -> CodeLens.
Uncheck "Enable CodeLens" option and click OK.
Go back into Tools -> Options... -> Text Editor -> All Languages -> CodeLens.
Check the "Enable CodeLens" option and click OK.
Note: I've fixed the issue once before by closing the problem .cs file and then reopening it. Closing any referenced files may also be required.
My Problem(s):
Similar to the original poster, CodeLens stopped refreshing references after I made a bunch of refactors. I was seeing stale references to code that didn't exist and I was also seeing the "- references" issue as described in the original post.
My Environment & Specific Scenario:
Visual Studio 2015 with Service Pack 2 and Resharper Ultimate 10.0.1
I was doing a major overhaul with a ton of refactoring and my project wasn't compilable for an hour or so. Once I could compile the project again, the references weren't working.
Same problem here.
CodeLens works normally with small solutions, but not working with large ones.
And this behavior is accompanied with crash of Alm.Shared.Remoting.RemoteContainer.dll process.
Tried in VS 2013 Update 4 and VS 2013 Update 5 RC.
Solution:
Close all programs and clean %LocalAppData%\Temp folder (or maybe just ALM folder inside it).
A simple solution, which works!
I did try enabling CodeLens in Visual Studio (2015) -->
Quick Launch (Ctrl+Q)
Options (CodeLens)
But, it was enabled :( Then, it did work with: (Closing the programs),
Win+R --> %temp% EnterDelete all
For me, CodeLens was disabled, so make sure it is still enabled.
I know it is an easy answer, but it might help some developers.
Go to Tools -> Options -> Text Editor -> All Languages -> CodeLens then click the "Enable CodeLens" option if it is not checked and then save it.
It looks like VS disabled it for some reason, maybe after an update or slow startup.
Try to remove .suo file which is storing some enviroment/solution settings. This helped me.
Just had this problem with VS 2019.
I tried disabling / enabling codelens and it didn't work.
I deleted the .suo after that and it didn't work.
I tried disabling / enabling codelens again (after deleting the .suo) and now it works again.
UPDATE (about 2 weeks later):
It started happening again and this time I disabled IntelliCode in Extensions and all of a sudden Codelens started working again.
UPDATE AGAIN (25 Nov 2019):
I reported this to Microsoft and had a dialog with them. You do not have to turn off all of Intellicode at this time, only disable Intellicode Refactorings in Tools -> Options -> Intellicode. The actual fix is slated for VS 2019 16.4 I believe.
You may have circular references in your solution that prevents CodeLens from working. Some details were provided in the comments for this issue on the Visual Studio Connect site:
Somehow, two of my projects in my solution ended up referencing each
other causing a circular reference. I think it was a by-product of
Resharper's shortcut to reference an undefined class. Once I was
cleaned up all of the references, I'm now getting valid values in my
reference counts.
How did you go about "cleaning" up references?
In my case, my solution has multiple project files. In the references
folder of Project A, there was a reference to Project B. In the
references folder of Project B, there was a reference to Project A.
This was causing the circular reference. If you try to do this
"manually", VS will prompt you with a warning regarding the circular
reference.
To clean this up, I removed the reference to Project B from my Project
A. I had do some minor class definitions in my Project B so everything
would still compile in the end.
I found out that if you block the Visual Studio with the Firewall, the Code Lens did not work.
So unblock it from the firewall to make it work.
Or edit Firewall settings for file:
C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\assembly\GAC_32\
Microsoft.Alm.Shared.Remoting.RemoteContainer\
v4.0_12.0.0.0__b03f5f7f11d50a3a\
Microsoft.Alm.Shared.Remoting.RemoteContainer.dll
I had this problem with VS2015 that already had "update 1" installed.
The thing was that I originally installed VS2015 with the "custom" setup, not the "default" option, and I accidentally left out the "Git for Windows (3rd party)" option under "Common Tools".
This can be fixed by these steps:
Run the VS2015 setup again (from control panel - uninstall program)
Right click VS2015, select "Change"
On popup screen, select "Modify"
On setup screen, select "Git for Windows (3rd party)"
Move on with the setup, install selected features
In Visual Studio Professional or Enterprise you can enable CodeLens by doing this:
Tools → Options → Text Editor → All Languages → CodeLens->Enable
This is not available in some Community Edition versions
Try deleting .suo file inside of the hidden .vs folder in your project. This worked for me in VS 2017.
My Problem
Always directly after enabling CodeLens, press OK, i see the extra space required for the CodeLens information and than it disappears and when i look at the options again it is diabled. Driving me nuts.
Approaches
Deleting caches/configurations. Clean start without Extensions work. Normal start without ReSharper works. Reinstall ReSharper + deleting cahces -> False behavior
Solution
Unter Extensions - ReSharper - Options - Environment - Performance Guide was "Disable CodeLens for all languages" set to "Fix Silently". Set to Ignore -> WORKS!
hope this helps someone
I had the same problem, but one's of my colleagues who has the same development environment than me, doesn't have it...
The only one difference between our both environment was the quantity of RAM. There is 10GB allocated to his VM, and on mine, there is 6GB allocated. Since I upgraded the quantity of RAM allocated to my VM to 8GB, all my references are shown !
Installing Update 1 for Visual Studio 2015 fixed the problem for me.
Download Update 1
After reading the answer to this Stack Overflow question CodeLens only showing references? I decided my problem with Codelens was I was running Visual Studio 2015 Update 1 but was using Team Foundation Server 2012. I upgraded to TFS 2015, which upgraded in place and didn't require any new settings or URIs to be connected to Visual Studio as before. Then I reloaded my solution - but I still had the issue where it just said "– references" everywhere. I closed Visual Studio, started it again and reloaded my solution and finally I saw the correct reference counts as they used to show.
I found on the new VS 2015 update 3 it happens on a large class in a medium level solution 10+ projects and has nothing to do with circular references, a bad SUO file, or other things. It appears just deleting the temp file location(as mentioned already), closing VS and then reopening and hitting 'ALT+2'(forcing a reference find for Code Lens) made it magically work for me.
It also appears in some solutions and projects Visual Studio will create an old referenced suo file in .vs folder. I don't know the exact rhyme or reason, but it could be created in my case and the CodeLens worked again. It could potentially be a Visual Studio options is somehow referenced in projects under source control. As I know this happened with an older solution I have upgraded many times that was under GitHub control and it does have an .gitignore file(ignore files could change depending on source control). Suffice to say I have had similar things happen with other techs in the past when there is a lock on a source control file that should be updated and won't update. Simple answer is to add to an ignore and delete the settings file.
I have Visual Studio 2017 Professional on Windows 10.
I have observed this under several circumstances:
MicroSoft decided I needed some critical update for Windows and it installed while I was working - causing some of the VS components to crash.
Visual Studio update was received in background.
Some component of Visual Studio crashed - not the VS just some attached feature (did not note exactly which one)
No known cause.
In each of these cases I did in order (sometimes it worked after each of these)
Build / Rebuild solution
Build / Clean Solution
Close and Restart Visual Studio
Remove Symbols cache, restart VS
Close BOTH VS and SSMS and restart them
Close VS and Restart Windows
Close VS, force all pending Windows updates to load, restart Windows
In options, Uncheck Codelens/apply and re-check/apply (OK button)
I tried most of the solutions above without luck, as I also saw this problem. On top, certain newly added classes were showing up as white/black (regular text) in Visual Studio.
Changing to Release typically helped, but wasn't a long-term solution.
However, this helped on both issues - verified on another machine. Maybe some of the steps can be left out.
Close all document tabs
Clean solution
Right click on solution, click "Enable Lightweight Solution Load"
Close solution
Reopen solution
Right click on solution, click "Disable Lightweight Solution Load"
Close solution
Reopen solution
Rebuild
Explicitly enable CodeLens in the workspace settings.json:
// show code lens on editor
"editor.codeLens": true,
Verify that the following properties show on the editor:
// inline count of reference for classes, interfaces, methods, properties,
// and exported objects
"typescript.referencesCodeLens.enabled": true
I could fix my problem with C# CodeLens and Omnisharp.
My C# extension was 1.25.0.
What I did to fix my problem:
C# extension -> Unistall -> Install another version -> Version 1.24.4
After that in the settings I searched for "omnisharp: use global mono" and set it from "auto" to "alwayse".
Then restart Omnisharp and wait for it to compile and show references.
Removing data from %temp% folder resolved my issue in VS 2022.
We have a really big solution with more than 200 projects and thousands of files. Despite of that the solution used to load pretty quickly in Visual Studio 2010 as well as 2012. However, after copying the whole SVN repository to another location, loading and closing the solution suddenly took extreeeemly long. (I am talking about 30-60 minutes here!)
I found a solution myself and I wanted to share it here, hoping that it might save someone quite a few hours of research and staring at the "Preparing solution..." dialog.
When inspecting the devenv.exe process with Process Monitor, I found out that it is pretty busy with accessing the .svn directory. Here is what I did (and this somehow solved the problem):
Kill Visual Studio
Open Visual Studio without loading a solution
Disable AnkhSvn as Source Control plugin (Tools->Options->Source Control->Plug-in Selection->None)
Disable "Document Well 2010 Plus" (VS2010) or "Custom Document Well" (VS2012) in Productivity Power Tools (Tools->Options->Productivity Power Tools) - I read that somewhere and it might have helped as well...
Close Visual Studio
Delete the solution's *.suo file. This is located in the same folder as the solution itself. NOTE: You will lose several settings for your solution, like currently opened files, breakpoints, bookmarks, current solution configuration & platform (e.g. Debug x86) etc.
Restart Visual Studio
Load the solution - it was much faster now!
Close Visual Studio
Open Visual Studio without loading a solution
Re-enable AnkhSvn and the "Document Well"
Restart Visual Studio
Open the solution - it was still loaded in seconds!
I do not know which of these steps actually solved the problem. Probably, not all these steps are required, but I did not want to reproduce the problem to find out which steps may be omitted. :)
None of those helped me, what I did... I watch with ProcMon of sysinternals, filtering for devenv, and I saw a lot of entries of fussionlog. I had enabled fussionlog for debugging purposes some weeks before and didn't think in disabling it. I just had to disable fussionlog and the solution opened faster.
You can open the Visual Studio in the Safe Mode, and then check your plugin and source control settings after opening the project.
Safe Mode means "Starts Visual Studio, loading only the default environment and services."
How :
devenv /SafeMode
Or according to your path
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe" /SafeMode
source : https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms241278.aspx
In my case, the following worked without any of the intervening steps suggested:
Kill Visual Studio.
Start Visual Studio directly (i.e., not from the .sln file).
Then, from within Visual Studio, open the solution.
In my case this was all it took to make the problem solution load quite quickly, without the need for me to change any settings or delete any files.
fwiw, I realize this is a late entry, but I found that simply removing (deleting) my large number of breakpoints resolved the excessive load time and compile time.
This action reduced the size of the .suo file from 214MB to 977KB. Let VS handle the .suo file itself.
Compiling and loading now takes < 1 minute instead of 5-10 minutes for a solution with 35 projects. Visual Studio 2012 Pro, update 4.
None of the other answers worked for me. CI compile times were fine, but loading my solution in Visual Studio was taking almost two minutes. VS would then operate just fine until I closed and opened the solution the next time. Different versions of VS all showed the same problem and both safe mode and deleting the suo didn't help.
I ended up following the advice in http://geekswithblogs.net/akraus1/archive/2014/04/30/156156.aspx to use Windows Performance Recorder to instrument VS and find the problem. By looking in Windows Performance Analyzer under the "CPU Usage (Sampled)" section and adding the "Stack (Frame Tags)" column, I was able to dig into the usage of devenv.exe.
Turns out the hot path by count had Microsoft.VisualStudio.Platform.WindowManagement.ni.dll 23 calls down, and below that eventually Microsoft.VisualStudio.ServerExplorer.dll and Microsoft.VisualStudio.Data.Package.dll. That pointed me to look in Server Explorer in the UI and open the Data Connections tab. There I found hundreds of mistakenly added connections that came from the debug web.config's ConnectionString section. Removing those from web.config reduced the load of that individual project from 90+ seconds to almost instant.
I have a different cause for the slow loading of the projects.
My situation is utilizing Git and found that even switching branches was slower than it should be with project load.
Solution: Run Visual Studio as Administrator
Reason: Something with the Corporate laptop is not providing the needed Git tool access (it doesn't recognize that a git repository is in use).
I have not seen any issues with Git or my personal access to any of the project files or Git objects.
I tried the above, but it didn't solve my problem.
Here's how I got around this problem, hopefully it will work for some of you as well:
Open Visual Studio 2013 with no solution.
Create a new C# Console application and save it.
Close Visual Studio.
Reopen the Console solution created in step 2.
Close Visual Studio.
Reopen the solution that was previously hanging on the Preparing Solution dialogue. Mine opened right away, no more hanging.
Using Visual Studio 2015, I ended up creating a new solution, adding the existing projects.
Deleting the *.suo from gehho's answer helped in the past, but didn't help me in this case. There's also another .suo file in a hidden .vs folder at the root of the solution.
There are other answers here for Visual Studio 2015 Visual Studio 2015 is extremely slow
For my case it was due to TFS issue. It thinks that there are more than 5000 pending changes.
The fix is to force TFS to recheck. Go to Team Explorer -> Source Control Explorer and do "Get Latest" on the projects that have pending changes. For things that are already matching TFS, Visual Studio will actually not download anything to your PC. For things that are different with TFS, Visual Studio will let you know and ask you to reconcile the difference.
This is VS 2019 Professional.
In my case there were <import ...> entries in the project files that pointed to
paths no longer available making the loading of the solution hang indefinitely without any form of information give (Shame on Microsoft!).
I encountered this problem only recently (Mar 2021), using VS 2019. It literarily takes 30+ seconds to load the file (each).
It only effects the Layout files. I believe it could be to do with the links within the files. I have not had time to investigate them.
However, I am writing this to suggest that regardless of the cause of the problem, a simple solution is to right click on the file and open it with Notepad to get your work done.
Recently, the SourceSafe integration into visual studio has started to perform badly because we have moved, and the SourceSafe "server" is located across a VPN which goes across a slow connection. This has made loading large projects in visual c++ 6 take 5+ minutes because it has to talk to the "server" for each project. Also, there are some bugs that are dangerous in the integration (the auto-checkout of certain shared projects will do a get latest on the wrong version of a branched file). This has caused me to want to disable the SourceSafe integration, however I have not found any menu option or uninstall option. Google has reported a few registry tweaks, but none of them seemed to work.
Does anyone know of an easy way to remove the SourceSafe integration from Visual C++ 6, without uninstalling SourceSafe altogether?
From http://support.microsoft.com/kb/236399:
Source code control software, such as
Microsoft Visual SourceSafe, that
integrates with the Visual C++
integrated development environment
(IDE) can be configured to connect to
a source code server during Visual C++
startup. In such cases, a loss in
network connectivity will cause Visual
C++ to start up very slowly. To
improve performance, either ensure
proper network connectivity or disable
the source code control software
integration with the Visual C++ IDE.
To do the latter, quit Visual C++, and
then use RegEdit.Exe to locate the
following registry key and set its
Disabled value to (DWORD) 0x00000001:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\DevStudio\6.0\Source Control\Disabled
I followed this and it seemed to work upon trying it again. I think I might've had a second copy of visual studio running when I did it the first time.
Open the .dsp and .dsw file in a text editor, and remove the respective entries from the .dsp and the .dsw file. Also, delete the .scc files.
There is a Microsoft Knowledge Base article about how to do exactly this.
The gist of it is that you must manually edit the .dsw and .dsp files in a text editor, and remove a few other files lying around. See the article for more details.
If the solutions mentioned above fail for you do this:
Rename folder: \Program Files\Microsoft\%vs%\Common7\IDE\VS SCC
VS will complain once about plug in not being there and you say "Yes" to ignore it in perpetuity.
All files “got latest,” “read only,” and edited in VS, will make VS complain and offer to “override”, which works fine for me.
What do you gain:
Open VSS-linked solutions quickly without VS matching contents to VSS server.
Open VSS-linked solutions and EDIT the files at will without being bogged down in “check out” bs.
This makes using other distributed source control system on top of project tree with VSS bindings painless.
VSS client still works by itself just fine, including diff, checkout, checkin.
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\DevStudio\6.0\Source Control\Disabled
I followed this and it seemed to work upon trying it again. I think I might've had a second copy of visual studio running when I did it the first time.
Its working .....Thanks Ajay
What has worked for us, and is much easier, requires no registry/file editing by hand, and safer I think is this:
1) Exit Visual Studio completely.
2) Disconnect from the network (unplug the cable and turn off wireless, or disable the network adapters)
3) Open the VS6 workspace (DSW) for the project. When it starts up it will find it cannot connect with the VSS database it wants to and ask you about that...
4) Tell VS to never try to reconnect to the source control db in the future.
5) Done... VS does all the changes to THAT WORKSPACE/PROJECT setup for you. You are not disconnecting VS from source control in general (like a registry edit would do) and your not manually editing files.