I’ve seen a *lot* of hits on my post “Visual Studio 2008 Is Pretty Damn Slow…“, which means that a lot of you are probably still experiencing speed issues with Visual Studio 2008. In regard to this, I thought it might be prudent to post information about the recently released Service Pack 1 for VS2008 and where to find it:
Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 (SP1) and .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 Downloads
Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 significantly improve the developer experience during the development process, and at runtime. These improvements address top issues reported by customers. For more information, see Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and .NET Framework 3.5 SP1.
Downloads
Additionally, the original hotfix which was intended to fix the speed issue (and is probably integrated into VS2008SP1) is available here:
And…
Here are all my posts related to this Visual Studio 2008:
- Visual Studio 2008 Is Pretty Damn Slow…
- …but its programmers are on the ball.
- Performance and Editor fixes for VS2008…
- Visual Studio 2008 Hotfix Is Excellent!
- Multi-Targeting VS2005 and VS2008 Web Application Projects, a Gotcha!
- Linkback: “Visual Studio 2008 C# IDE is Slow … Really slow.”
- Getting started with VisualSVN « Mike In Madison
- Google: Top Billing
Williamo's Blog 
I’ve been facing the same problems with Visual Studio 2008 before and after the service pack. It is a little better after the service pack…now it only takes 2 minutes to open a web form instead of 3 minutes.
I’m running on a pretty nice dev machine with dual core, 4 gigs of ram, etc. VS 2005 runs flawlessly and always has.
I have slowness in VS2008 that is so frustrating I am considering going back to notepad too. I mean, it is slow in the markup editor, the code view, and the designer- don’t even get me started on the designer. Took me an hour to simply NAME 20 controls in the designer yesterday. Every time I change a property it takes about 30 seconds to a minute to regain consciousness to the point where it will allow me to change another property or select another control.
And onto the horrible speed issues the problem of controls with nested properties *sometimes* losing everything you change in the designer when switching to markup view (for example a gridview can lose all of the columns you create in the designer under some certain, unknown circumstances; it only happens about 70% of the time), plus that same old bug from 2005 where when you select a control sometimes the properties window doesn’t refresh and you end up inadvertantly changing the properties of the last control you had selected, and VS2008 becomes the worlds biggest crap shoot. I never know what I am going to get, what will work and what will fail, and how many things I am going to have to do over because for whatever reason VS2008 didn’t keep my changes.
This is really a sad state of affairs and I wish there was something I could do to make Microsoft understand how badly this has affected my life, and the ability of my company to deliver products on time, or be able to predict how long development will take.
Installed VS2008 SP1. Took a long time to install.
Didn’t fix the problem. Blah.
Actually, I take that back. I’m now able to kill devenv.exe when this happens, whereas previously it wouldn’t die and I’d have to reboot.
Trash.
This now happens every single time I open VS. If I have files open and try to close the program, it crashes.
I love this site so so so much 🙂 Cool site!!,
Have SP1 installed. VWD is still miserably slow. Very disappointing.
Update: I happened to notice my website was still targeting .NET v2.0. I changed it to target v3.5, and then uninstalled the Ajax Extensions 1.0 for .NET 2.0. This made VWD MUCH more responsive! I then had some broken controls, but I got those fixed as soon as I downloaded the latest Ajax Control Toolkit.
I am now MUCH happier!