In regard to my previous post, Visual Studio 2008 Is Pretty Damn Slow, a couple engineers from Microsoft have contacted me to let me know that a hotfix has been made public which should address the performance issues I mentioned in that previous post.
The blog entry regarding this hotfix can be found here:
Downloadable Hotfix: Performance and Editor fixes for Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Web Developer Express 2008
More info from Scott Guthrie’s Blog:
VS 2008 Web Development Hot-Fix Roll-Up Available
More info from Rick Stahl’s Blog:
Visual Studio Hotfix for Slow Web Forms Editing and Input Focus Issues
And the hotfix itself, here:
Connect.Microsoft.Com (DownloadID=10826)
Quote from the MSDN blog linked above (Downloadable Hotfix…):
Issues that are fixed:
We have fixed several bugs in this hotfix. All bug fixes are listed below.
HTML Source view performance
- Source editor freezes for a few seconds when typing in a page with a custom control that has more than two levels of sub-properties.
- “View Code” right-click context menu command takes a long time to appear with web application projects.
- Visual Studio has very slow behavior when opening large HTML documents.
- Visual Studio has responsiveness issues when working with big HTML files with certain markup.
- The Tab/Shift-Tab (Indent/Un-indent) operation is slow with large HTML selections.
Design view performance
- Slow typing in design view with certain page markup configurations.
HTML editing
- Quotes are not inserted after Class or CssClass attribute even when the option is enabled.
- Visual Studio crashes when ServiceReference element points back to the current web page.
JavaScript editing
- When opening a JavaScript file, colorization of the client script is sometimes delayed several seconds.
- JavaScript Intellisense does not work if an empty string property is encountered before the current line of editing.
Web Site build performance
Build is very slow when Bin folder contains large number of assemblies and .refresh files with web-site projects.
Williamo's Blog 
I was experimenting very slow UI in VS 2008 SP1 while editing Windows Forms. I applied that fix and now it works normally. It doesn’t seem to be included in SP1. Thanks.
I applied the fix even though I had already installed SP1. Unfortunately there is no change. Still unusable and very slow IDE. Back to very slow VS2005 for now (which is the reason I moved to VS2008)
Mine is painfully slow still, no change at all after SPK1 and Hotfix.
Mine really chokes on saving and switching between design and source views.
Microsoft Visual Studio 2008
Version 9.0.30729.1 SP
Microsoft .NET Framework
Version 3.5 SP1
Installed Edition: Professional
Microsoft Visual Basic 2008 91605-270-5321037-60046
Microsoft Visual Basic 2008
Microsoft Visual C# 2008 91605-270-5321037-60046
Microsoft Visual C# 2008
Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 91605-270-5321037-60046
Microsoft Visual C++ 2008
Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Team Explorer 91605-270-5321037-60046
Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Team Explorer
Version 9.0.30729.1
Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Tools for Office 91605-270-5321037-60046
Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Tools for Office
Microsoft Visual Web Developer 2008 91605-270-5321037-60046
Microsoft Visual Web Developer 2008
same here, but it started last week before it was ok.
any fix