Visual Studio 2010 and/or win7 64 bit limits - visual-studio-2010

Does anyone have experience writing apps in VisualStudio 2010 C Premium that uses large amounts of ram and multiple cpus?
I am about to order a workstation with Dual hex-core Xeon 5690 processors (12 cores total, 24 hyperthreaded) and 48 gigabytes of RAM, but first would like to know if VS can handle that number of cores and RAM.
(Of course this is all 64bit) I can't seem to find a straight answer either from MS or the hardware vendor, or from the Web.
Thanks
Update: someone just sent me this link
I realize now that that my question was mis-directed. The real issue is whether the target OS can address that much RAM and run dual cpu.
So, unless I'm misreading it, the infomation in the link above means that if you want to write an application that will run on Windows 7, and even if you require the 64bit version, you are limited to 16 gb. The only way to get around that is require users to run Win 7 Professional, Enterprise or Ultimate 64 bit versions.

It's a little tricky to be sure quite what you mean. VS2010 can certainly produce output that takes full advantage of such hardware. And the IDE itself will run very nicely on such a roomy machine.
Your update discusses memory limits imposed by Windows itself. You say:
If you want to write an app that will run on Windows 7, and even if you require the 64bit version, you are limited to 16 gb. The only way to get around that is require users to run Win 7 Professional, Enterprise or Ultimate 64 bit versions.
The reality is that nobody will buy a machine with more than 16GB RAM and then install an OS edition which does not support that amount of RAM. That would just be a waste of money. If your app requires more RAM than that and your customers are prepared to get hold of such a machine, then they will be quite happy to put the Pro version of Windows on it.

Visual Studio is just an IDE. Limitations are imposed by the compiler and an OS, and are usually listed in help under Limitations or something alike. Unfortunatelly, I don't have C compiler installed, but try searching through help while waiting for other answers.

Related

Why did formatting win 7 computers to windows 10 double their CPU-Z bench score?

I didn't want to ask this question here. I asked it on superuser but didn't get an answer.
https://superuser.com/questions/1420073/why-did-formatting-win-7-computers-to-windows-10-double-their-cpu-z-bench-score
So I work at a company as an IT guy while I am doing my computer engineering degree. Doing hardware and software maintenance of computers is part of my job. I have had a weird experience with two of the computers. These two computers(one desktop one laptop) were the slowest computers in the company. The laptop is Dell Inspiron N5010 with i3 370M(2 cores, 4 threads) processor. The desktop is HP 500B MT with E5800(2 cores 2 threads) processor.
At first, both of these computers had windows 7 running on them. CPU-Z(1.87.0) benchmark of the desktop was 113(single thread), 227(multithread). The laptop was 82, 267.
After I formatted these computers with windows 10 and ran the same CPU-Z version benchmark, I got exactly double performance with both computers. Both single threading and multithreading scores got doubled.
After formatting with windows 10, desktop got 270, 510. Laptop got 180, 520.
What is causing this? Physical core number stayed the same. Logical core number stayed the same. I am baffled.
Is it possible that you upgraded from 32 bit Windows 7 to 64 bit Windows 10?
According to this FAQ under the point What algorithm does the benchmark use... they state that
the 32-bit version keeps using the legacy x87 instructions, resulting
in almost half of the x64 performance
edit: please remove question here because it is not about code. I answered on superuser as well
If the difference in speed is noticeable, it might have been an issue with the drivers on WIndows 7, or it might have had something to do with huge pages (enabling huge pages could boost the CPU performance significantly).
If you can't notice the difference in speed/responsiveness, it might just be a bug in CPU-Z (Have you tried the newest version 1.88?).
Going from Windows7 to Windows10 should not on its own result in such drastic changes in performance, the CPU benchmarks should be pretty close. Windows versions are also important, I've seen tests between Win10 1803 and Win10 1809 which show approx 10% increase in FPS in favor of 1809 (but that's GPUs not CPUs).

System Requirement for VS 2010

I have a laptop machine with below configuration:
Core 2 Duo # 1.4 GHz
4GB RAM
320GB HardDrive
Windows 7
Whether this is sufficient for installing VS 2010? The speed of processor is 1.4GHz, but in Microsoft website they have given minimum of 1.6GHz processor speed. Can anyone tell from their experience?
Thanks in advance.
Will most likely install, however I would expect it will run slow. Depends on what sort of work you are doing. Small console apps would be OK but I doubt full blown WPF/Silverlight apps would be speedy. Also, if your connecting to a local SQL instance.. etc (could pull an increased overhead).
Sum Up.
Will install.
Work will be tedious.
Another SO post for reference VS 2010 Requirments
The main issue is the way that VS2010 uses WPF; you might find that large files behave a little jerkily in the text editor, but I don't think it'll be un-usable.
I've not tried VS2010, but I do have VS2008 + SQL Server Express installed on a netbook with a few years old Atom CPU and 2 GB of RAM, and it works fine though it's obviously a bit slow. So I'd assume that you'll have no problems since even if the requirements for VS2010 are higher, your laptop is much higher spec than that netbook.
Will work. but might have some performace issues on Editor / Designer. I had a machine with almost similar configuration. used it for silverlight developement. I always has problem in the design preview of the XAML file. - it gets loaded after some time then expected time.

General pitfalls when moving to 64-bits Vista?

Well, to begin with, I'm using Visual Studio 2008 on a 32-bits Windows XP system. I have a second 32-bits Vista system but that's not used for development.
I just ordered a new development computer which will use 64-bits Vista. (Don't want Windows 7 just yet, but will probably upgrade to Windows 7 in two years from now if it has a good market value.) (Btw, Intel Xeon Quadcore, 12 GB RAM, 1.3 TB diskspace over 2 disks.) I know that most 32-bits applications will work just fine, including VS and several others. I'm not too worried about this anyways. I also do development with Delphi 2007 but am not worried about this either. But I do want to take this in consideration:
On this new 64-bits system I can start developing 64-bits applications. This is new for me, so what are the most common pitfalls that I need to avoid when I start to develop new 64-bits applications? For example, datatypes that are of a different size, a file system that might be different, special 64-bits functions that I need to be aware of, possible conflict when I have to combine my 64-bits code with 32-bits assemblies, etc.
(I know one already: when developing web applications, I need to make sure my webhost is supporting 64-bits applications, else it's no use... Apparently, IIS doesn't seem to be able to support both 64-bits and 32-bits applications, so that's one pitfall.)
I'm not going to port 32-bits applications to 64-bits applications. I just want to create new 64-bits applications. From scratch! So without any 32-bits history. I've also read about this unanswered Caveat question but that's more about migrating. I won't migrate anything.
Deployment headaches at least for desktop applications.
Special Folders are different for some reason.
Edit and Continue in Visual Studio only works when compiling to 32bit.
You could find some obscure issues which could take forever to work around.
I've been using a 64-bit Vista system since November, with very few problems. The worst so far is that in Visual Studio, to debug a Script Task in SSIS, you have to tell it not to use the 64-bit runtime.

Visual studio on windows xp

i need to run a few visual studios on windows XP and it seems to take up a lot of memory. i am also running resharper which is a memory hog.
i am running 32 bit XP. How much memory can i put into my machine until i get to the point where the OS hits its limit.
Also, any other ways of running multiple visual studio without such slow performance.
32-bit Operating Systems are limited to 4 GB of RAM, which may or may not be enough for you. Also, I think Windows shows 3 GB of RAM if you install 4 GB.
I suggest you switch to 64-bit and upgrade to 8 GB if you can.
UPDATE: See Jeff's blog post on the subject: Dude, Where's My 4 Gigabytes of RAM?
The maximum amount of memory that can be seen by 32bit WinXP is somewhere between 3 and 4 gigabytes depending on your chipset.
I have also run into issues running multiple instances of VS when I had resharper installed. The only thing you can do is run 64bit XP with more memory, or not use resharper (which is a bummer).
32-bit Windows kernel divides the 4GB virtual addressing space in 2GB/2GB partitions. If you feed the /3GB switch to NTLDR it will offer 1GB kernel space / 3GB user mode space. Note that this NOT implies that you can't write software to take advantage of machines with 32-bit CPUs and address more than 4GB at once.
A workaround is the hardware-supported feature to access the remaining memory in banks or "windows" since the CPU still sees a maximum of 4GB addressable space at once. Some database and GIS software offer this possibility. This is called Physical Address Extensions and allows to use (not addressing at once) up to 64GB with 36-bit addresses. WinXP offers AWE, an API built on top of PAE.
That's the theory. For using Visual Studio you can get the full 4GB for your system or upgrade to a 64-bit OS with more RAM. This only if VS offers a 64-bit version.
"Also, any other ways of running multiple visual studio without such slow performance."
+1 trick: you should use a RAM disk (download) to accelerate I/O.
If you're using - and hopefully do - source-managament system (ie. Subversion), you must just checkout your projects there. VS.NET makes tons of I/O calls, and RAM disks are much faster than real disks.
CAUTION! If you turn off your computer, RAM Disk disappers.

How much space should I leave for my Windows 7 partition?

I'm setting up a complete .NET development environment on my Macbook Pro.
I'm using Visual Studio 08 team suite, SQL server 2008, MS Office and other tools (like FinalBuilder, RegexBuddy, Beyond Compare).
How big should my windows 7 (beta currently) partition be? Will 100GB be enough?
NOTE: I wasn't sure if this was programming related enough for SO, so I'll just let the community decide if this question is relevant.
100 GB should be more than enough for all those apps. I've installed win7 in a virtual machine and the virtual HDD ended up with a size of 7GB (that's only the OS of course). Trying the same with Vista, for example, uses about 25GB. It seems they're making it lighter.
You described my laptop. 100 GB would leave approx. 40GB for Users directory.
100 GB will be plenty. You'll have OS, apps, but no music, pics, videos. 100GB is probably overkill, especially if you can resize it if needed.
I have Windows 7 installed on a laptop with 2 100 Gb hard drives.
Currently I'm using 18 Gb and that's with most of the primary stuff installed, but not Visual Studio or SQL, but those probably won't use more than 10 Gb (I reckon). I do have Virtual XP Mode installed which is probably quite large too.
The Windows folder is about 9.3 Gb
The User folder is 3.2 Gb (but I have some large files on my desktop)
The Program Files is 3.0 Gb
The rest of the files on the OS-drive are mostly driver files which you don't have to leave on the drive itself.
So 100 gb would probably even be an overkill, but does give you some headroom!
Windows7 is going to be a little bit smaller than Windows Vista. So if you create partition big enough for Windows Vista, it will be perfect for Windows7.
See Engineering7 blog for more information about disk space in Windows7.
I would give as much as you could to Windows 7, since it will probably become your primary OS. I find that I rarely use my OSX partition, except for cracking WEP.
100 GB is barely enough. You can install Windows 7 and the mentioned programs along with lot of other stuff, but once you get to have some lots of trash there and there plus you happen to download movies and such it gets cumbersome.
Unless you're relying on some other device for things other than those tools, I recommend a larger space allocation, of at least 150 GB

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