Visual Studio long project run/startup - visual-studio

Our issue is as follows:
solution takes a while to start up when running
after hitting run and while monitoring the Output window, constant work done is loading project related files from .net temp dir
this really takes a while
this is a Web Forms app with quite a large set of UI controls/pages and about 250 DLL/component dependencies
references are added as DLL refs and not proj refs
Given the information above, what would be some of the suggestions to speed up solution startup at run times?

Frankly, there may not be a whole lot you can do. But be sure to disable antivirus scanning of the project, as scanning each file as it loads will slow the machine to a crawl.
There are a few other tips floating around, but I'm hoping performance will be improved via an update of some sort.
Lots of links and things to try are here:
http://www.experts-exchange.com/blogs/TheLearnedOne/B_4684-Visual-Studio-NET-2010-Performance.html

Related

Externally generated projects(premake/cmake) lock up VS2015

I'm using premake5 here.
It generates my solution/project files, when this happens, VS2015 asks me if I want to reload the modified projects.
If I hit yes, this proceeds to lock up the IDE for a very long time.
Anywhere from 30 seconds to 1 minute I'd say.
Does anyone know of a way to work around this? This is super irritating.
It happens even for the most trivial of changes(modify one project, which only has 1 file in it).
I realize this is a VS problem, and not directly the fault of premake/cmake(or whatever build system you are using), but it totally sucks.
As you said, it's VS related :) But I think you have some problems with your installation : for small projects, reloading the whole solutions should be pretty fast : my personal projects take less than a second to reload (2 to 4 projects per solution, ~100 files per project)
Anyway in the usual course of development, re-generating your projects should not happen that often, except at the very beginning when you need to configure everything.
When you need to add a few files, just add them through Visual Studio : you won't have to run Premake again, and next time you run it, the files will be included by your script anyway. You can do the same with small configuration changes : update your project directly in VS, check that it works, and when it does, upadte the Premake script. You won't have to run Premake then.

Corrupt VB.Net VS2010 project recovery

In the last year I've worked on two relatively large .NET projects and both of them have ended up with project/code generation strangeness that I just haven't figured out how to fix..
The first project generates some bad code for forms that causes the VB.Net build to fail. I actually had to make a search/replace macro that fixes the 5 problems by adding a Global. to the beginning of a few references.
I chalked that up to a random act of unkindness against me and went on my way since the macro takes about 2 seconds to run...
So now 6 months later and new project is cranking along and I get a similar-ish problem. I have a bunch of form controls that store state in a settings file using the built in capabilities of .Net. I had about 20 controls that were configured automatically this way. Works great until today when for reasons I don't understand in the designer.vb file gets corrupted. At least one other person on the planet has had this problem here:
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/winformsdesigner/thread/9bd20b56-7264-4a1f-a379-ad66b372ddd3
but the proposed solution didn't change the behavior.
So now I've had two projects (larger ones) that have project file issues that I can't resolve (I've had several smaller projects that are just fine).
What tools are available to fix projects, migrate projects, lint projects ... anything to recover projects to a reasonable state? Any successful recovery procedures beyond a roll-back/merge?
i had a corrupted reference issue linked to my use of mercurial and VS getting lost in file save time... if this may help...
If you open it in notepad and its corrupted - then its probably corrupted and the only way to restore it would be to go to a backup.
--> go to backup
-->click your project name
-->and then find your fire thats are corrupt

WP7 - Isolated Storage settings wiped on "Rebuild"

I just discovered (the hard way) that if you deploy your application to a device after doing a "Rebuild" or a "Clean -> Build" from Visual Studio your app is first uninstalled and then reinstalled resulting in the isolated storage files being wiped.
The Application Deployment Tool always seems to do uninstall - reinstall irrespective of whether it was an incremental build or not.
Has anybody found a workaround to this? Of course, the most obvious one is never to rebuild your application, but what if you accidentally do? Currently, I don't have all the generated files under source control, so if I were to try to build the app on another computer it would be a rebuild (maybe I will add all the generated junk into source control if no one has a workaround)
If I can suggest an alternative appraoch.. I think you will find it beneficial in other situations as well if you can introduce a little process to the generation of your test data so that it is easier to either a) restore or b) generate.
You could for example have a debug build only feature to upload/download the files on the device to a wcf service running locally on your PC (a simplified version of what Rongchaua did here).
Or, more work, if you are willing, but offering even more additional benefits would be to develop some automated testing capability into your app.. starting with generation of initial test data. Here's something you could look at to get started on that path.
Claus Konrad Blog: WP7: How to unit test a MVVM Light WP7-application
Granted these would take a bit of effort, but it's an approach that gives you some independence from manually generated test data, which in my experience invariably turns out to be a hassle at various times. And once solved, you find all sorts of reasons to thank yourself for doing it later.. whether it be saved time, or more robust testing because you can afford to be more aggresive with your test data/test execution and manage multiple test data configurations.
There is a a workaround:
open the solution configuration manager
next to build is a deploy column, uncheck your project
press F5
This will launch the app that is already on the device without overwriting it (and deleting its storage).

Visual Studio locking files while debugging

I have a VS solution containing several projects. While debugging a particular project all the source files are locked by VS. I would like to unlock sources that the debugee doesn't have dependency on. Is there any way to do this within one solution?
UPDATE:
I'm using Win XP SP3 32bit. Visual Studio 2010, C#. Edit and Continue is enabled. The solution contains 6 projects (number in not important actually), 5 of them depend on the data access layer project which uses Entity Framework. None of the 5 have any mutual dependencies. They are WinForms and Console applications. I would like to be able to run one of the projects and make changes to others without stopping the first. The problem is starting and stopping the project take considerable amount of time.
The Edit and Continue feature is preventing you from editing files if the debugger hasn't stopped the program. The simple workaround is Debug + Break All, you should then be able to edit the files, your changes will be immediately effective provided your changes do not violate the restrictions imposed by E+C. This is the most efficient work flow.
The heavy-handed approach is to disable Edit and Continue. Tools + Options, Debugger, Edit and Continue, uncheck the Enable check box.
I don't think that there is a way to avoid that. While debugging Visual Studio lock all files to prevent any change on them, including those on other projects.
You can try to open the project which you are interested on with another Visual Studio instance to make changes to your files or open files singularly with another editor.
This doesn't quite answer the OP's question per se, but for anyone who has stumbled upon this page in the same (very frustrated) boat as I am, this might help.
The solution: start without debugging.
It was driving me absolutely crazy that Visual Studio would not let me edit files while the app was running. My typical workflow is:
Make some changes
Run the app to see the effects of those changes
Based on the results, make more changes, etc. etc.
The problem is Visual Studio was preventing me from step 3. It demands that you STOP running the app before you can even make any changes (including to a XAML file or adding a file to the project), which also means that you can't go back to the app to double-check something while you are actually programming it at the same time (which is how I work, bro).
Thank god I finally discovered if I run without debugging it doesn't impose this ridiculous limitation. It's still a pain in the butt if you actually need to debug something you have to re-run the app in debug mode, but it sure beats having to kill the app before it will even let you edit a file.

Visual Studio 2008 Painfully Slow Under SVN

I have recently been through the pain of converting an legacy WebSite project to a (C#)Web Application Project. During this time I also migrated the code from VSS control to Subversion on a dev server.
When debugging the application under VS2008 the project can literally take 4/5 minutes to completely load up. The majority of this time the Output Window states that it is loading symbols from Temp ASP.NET directory.
Figuring this may be an issue that it is under SVN control, I exported the project and began debugging without source control and this resolved the issue.
Can anyone suggest why this could be happening, ie. why under source control is it taking such a long time to debug?
Symbol loading shouldn't have anything to do with .svn. If moving your project solved the problem, I'd guess it's something to do with the difference between your actual copy and the exported one. Particularly, I'd say it would be to do with a file unlikely to be committed, like a ".user" file. The ".user" file probably has a lot of extra junk that VS is trying to load, and moving it means they got reset.
Check for any files missing (after a clean export...they'll have been re-created after you open the solution 1x) and you'll probably find the culprit.
You could try the TortoiseSVN client
The more plugins (Resharper etc) you have for VS the slower things tend to get.

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